Ridley Scott Claims Neill Blomkamp’s ‘Alien 5’ Never Even Had a Script
In hindsight, it seems kind of odd that we had two directors competing to make movies in the same franchise. Back in 2015, director Neill Blomkamp sort of bull-rushed Hollywood by releasing concept art from the Alien 5 sequel he had been working on for 20th Century Fox. This was despite the fact that Ridley Scott had already made Prometheus — a direct prequel to the events of the Alien universe — and was working on what would later become Alien: Covenant. After months of rumors and Blomkamp’s promise to bring back a few beloved characters, the project petered out, and Scott emerged the sole proprietor of the Alien franchise.
And with Alien: Covenant set to hit theaters this summer, Scott is going pretty hard on his feelings about Blomkamp’s project. In an interview with French publication Allocine (via ScreenRant and Heroic Hollywood), Scott claimed that Blomkamp’s film never even had a script to go along with its cool concept art:
I don’t think it will ever see the light of day. There was never a script. Just an idea that evolved from a dozen or so pages. I had to participate as producer, but it didn’t go farther because Fox decided it didn’t want to do it. As far I was concerned, I had already done Prometheus and I was working on Covenant.
Of course, that’s not what James Cameron — the other director to make an icon Alien movie — had to say about a possible Alien 5 script. Back in 2016, Cameron claimed that Blomkamp had given him a copy of the script, even going so far as to say that it was “a very strong script, and he can go make it tomorrow.” Cameron was even backed up by Sigourney Weaver, who spoke in-depth on several occasions about Blomkamp’s “great” script. We seem to find ourselves in a bit of a “he said, she and he said” situation here.
All of which means one of two things: either Scott is right, and Cameron and Weaver were both a little too exuberant in describing Blomkamp’s output as a “script,” or Cameron and Weaver are right, and Scott is throwing some colossal shade on a filmmaker who he feels was encroaching on his territory. Or maybe they’re all correct, and Blomkamp was very Machiavellian about what materials he showed and to whom? We’ve officially reached the point where I’d rather see a movie about the non-making of Alien 5 than the film itself, because it sounds like more drama than any number of space monsters could provide.