Speculating often comes with an egg in the face, but it’s hard to not take this one seriously considering how poorly Alien: Covenant performed at the box office.

Before Covenant hit theaters, Ridley Scott revealed that he planned to quickly go into production on the tentatively titled Alien: Awakening, the third film in the revitalized franchise. In fact, just three weeks ago Scott swore (in an interview with EW) that he’s still making the next film.

Contrary to what Scott’s claiming, HumanMedia, a member of the Blu-Ray.com forums who claims to have worked on Alien: Covenant, the sequel was originally scheduled to begin pre-production in September 2017, but was shelved after the tepid box office response to Alien: Covenant. (Thanks to AvP Galaxy for the tip.)

“The sequel to Covenant was originally due to start preproduction this month in Sydney,” the tipster explained. “After the box office results filming was cancelled, and a warehouse storage unit full of stuff was auctioned off a few months ago. So the original plan of pumping out another quickly has definitely changed with no immediate plans for anything.”

This is a terribly bad sign if true, and is only exasperated by the recent Disney purchase of Fox that would put the Alien franchise in new hands. However, there is some hope being that Scott still envisions big things for the franchise and knows how to make a movie on a budget. I’ve talked about this in the past, but Scott is the master at tightening the screws on his films and bringing them in on budget (or less). If Fox were to request an even tighter budget on the Covenant followup, Scott is the one director who could pull it off. I’ve suggested in past articles that Scott may need to go back to the drawing board and the film being shut down could signal just that. It’s not necessarily the death of Alien, but the future doesn’t look as certain as it did the day before Covenant‘s release.

Any new info and you’ll be the first to know.