Ridley Scott is just about done filming “Alien: Covenant” in Sydney, Australia where he’s been working on the project for a good few months. The “Prometheus” follow-up is slated to hit in August next year and was the cause of another project set within the “Alien” universe being put on hold – Neill Blomkamp’s proposed direct sequel to “Aliens”.

There’s still hope the film will go ahead though, Scott himself is an executive producer on it and series star Sigourney Weaver is still quite keen to revisit. Speaking with EW this week, the actress revealed a few more scant details about the story which will serve as a different conclusion to Ripley’s story:

“I hope it won’t be a few (years). I hope it’ll be a couple. But we’ll see… It’s a great story and it’s satisfying to me to give this woman an ending…The script itself has so much in it that’s so original, but also really satisfies the, I would say, the primal needs of the aliens. It’s a tribute to all of the great work that the other directors have done, in a way, but goes in a completely new direction. I hope we’ll do it.”

Weaver also speaks about how the film diverges from the path that “Alien 3” and “Alien: Resurrection” took:

“It’s just as if, you know, the path forks and one direction goes off to three and four and another direction goes off to Neill’s movie. It’s just more, I would say, following Jim Cameron’s story about these characters, rather than just ending up in this sort of monastery in space, which was [Alien3 screenwriter] Vincent Ward’s idea and Fox elected to go in that direction. I think Fincher was fine with that. Each director kind of wanted to create a whole new set of circumstances. In this case, it picks up, it follows directly the circumstances of Jim Cameron’s Aliens.”

Another person speaking about the franchise this week is comedian Danny McBride who has a role in ‘Covenant’ and says that, despite his presence, there’s no comic relief in the film:

“I got the script and I’m like this s–t is dark! There is no comic relief in this at all. This is a dark horror movie. That was exciting. To be able to step into something like that and to participate in a way that not relying on things I’d done before.”

“Alien: Covenant” is currently targeting an August 2017 release.