The future of the Alien franchise is in a state of flux at the moment, but Ridley Scott’s plans for the next movie—if it ever gets made—are quite intriguing. Following the polarizing reaction to Prometheus, Scott went back to his horror film roots with its sequel, Alien: Covenant. The film received mixed-to-positive reviews and never made a big splash at the box office, leading to Fox to reassess the franchise.

Even though Scott had already pitched two more sequels that he wanted to make, Fox has yet to announce another Alien film. Now however, thanks to Empire (via HN Entertainment), story details on the proposed sequel have been revealed.

The script, penned by John Logan, who co-wrote Alien: Covenant, the follow-up film is called Alien: Awakening and would pick up after the end Covenant and follow Michael Fassbender‘s David as he brought the franchise full circle, back to the planet we first saw in the original Alien:

“Logan’s script would have seen the return of Prometheus’ Engineers, with that species’ survivors coming after the genocidal David. Setting-wise, Scott said it was obvious ‘We’re gonna actually go to the planet’. by which we assume he means LV-426.”

It always felt like there was more to be done with the Engineers, and indeed that was Scott’s original plan for Prometheus 2 before he changed course. Around the time of Prometheus’ release, here’s what Scott said about the sequel:

“Because [the Engineers] are such aggressive fuckers … and who wouldn’t describe them that way, considering their brilliance in making dreadful devices and weapons that would make our chemical warfare look ridiculous? So I always had it in there that the God-like creature that you will see actually is not so nice, and is certainly not God. As she says, ‘This is not what I thought it was going to be, and I think we should get the Hell out of here or there won’t be any place to go back to.’ That’s not necessarily planted in the ground at the tail end of the third act, but I knew that’s kind of where we should go, because if we’ve opened up this door — which I hope we have because I certainly would like to do another one – I’d love to explore where the hell [Dr. Shaw] goes next and what does she do when she gets there, because if it is paradise, paradise can not be what you think it is. Paradise has a connotation of being extremely sinister and ominous.”

What’s even more intriguing is that Scott intended for David to confront the Engineers, but again around the time of Prometheus, the filmmaker revealed the franchise’s religious ties, saying that the Engineers previously sent an emissary down to make humanity behave, and the emissary’s name was Jesus Christ:

“We definitely did [have that in the script], and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an ‘our children are misbehaving down there’ scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, ‘Lets send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.’ Guess what? They crucified him.’”

Given how much Scott had/has planned for this franchise, it would be incredibly disheartening to see Alien go away. For now, for fans of the weird places Scott was taking this franchise, it’s interesting to hear where he wanted to take this series.