Image: Fox

While there are mixed feelings about whether Ridley Scott’s newer movies set in the Alien universe are good are not, there’s a general consensus that neither Prometheus nor Alien: Covenant have really done much to move the franchise forward. But that isn’t stopping Scott from planning his next film in the series.


In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Scott insisted that he’d get around to filming another Alien movie at some point in the future, but he felt as if it was time for the franchise’s focus to shift away from the xenomorphs. Though the very distinct kind of body horror that the aliens present worked for Covenant, Scott continued, he feels strongly that future stories set in that universe should be focused on artificially intelligent beings like Michael Fassbender’s David and Walter. Said Scott:

“We are [going to make another], we are. I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff. People say, ‘You need more alien, you need more face pulling, need more chest bursting,’ so I put a lot of that in Covenant and it fitted nicely. But I think if you go again you need to start finding another solution that’s more interesting. I think AI is becoming much more dangerous and therefore more interesting.”


Scott pointed out that the Alien films have always dabbled in the idea of how dangerous artificial intelligence can be, and pointed to Facebook’s recent experiment with AIs talking to one another as an example of why an AI-driven Alien movie would be relevant. Said Scott:

“They put two AIs together and they were communing. It already invented a f—ing language! And they couldn’t decipher what the language was so they had to switch them off. What was said and where’s it gone? They could have already implemented something we don’t know.”

While that’s not exactly what happened in real life, it certainly sounds like a science fiction plot in the making. That said, Scott’s next few projects aren’t scifi (historical kidnapping drama All the Money in the World is out December 22), and there’s no timeline yet for the next Alien film.