Alien 5 will be delayed by the Avatar sequels and The Gone World according to new comments by Sigourney Weaver. Yesterday, Entertainment Weekly published an interview with Sigourney Weaver in the lead up to the 30th anniversary reunion at San Diego Comic Con.

Most sites are focusing on the comments about giving Ripley an ending (“it’s a great story and it’s satisfying to me to give this woman an ending“), something that was actually reported on three months ago or what appears to be a mis-interpretated quote regarding Alien 5 exploring the “Alien’s motivations” (“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“).

However, there’s a comment in there that few seem to be focusing on and that’s that it maybe sometime before Alien 5 begins filming…

“Now that we’re waiting for that [Alien: Covenant], I have a couple of Avatars to do and Neill has The Gone World,” Weaver says. “So we’ll have to see what happens when we get back, when those projects are over.”

Ridley Scott had always said it was his intention to film Alien: Covenant first and we had assumed that work would begin on Neill Blomkamp’s Alien not long after. This had previously been speculated to be so that Fox wasn’t saturating the market and having 2 Alien related films coming out in quick succession. However, it’s possible that had that request not been made then we’d have already seen Alien 5.

“Well, we have a great script. Fox asked us to delay so Ridley Scott could shoot his [second] Prometheus movie. That was too bad because we would have already done it by now.”

It is possible that Weaver maybe able to start work on Alien 5 after Avatar 2 is done but Avatar 2 isn’t due for release until December 2018. Weaver did say she hoped it wouldn’t be too long though.

“I hope it won’t be a few [years]. I hope it’ll be a couple. But we’ll see. Yeah.”

With both James Cameron and Sigourney Weaver attending the reunion panel, we may hopefully get some more information about the timing. Blomkamp’s The Gone World currently has no release date set. Thanks to Omega Underground for the news.