Neill Blomkamp's ALIEN Sequel is Still Years Away, Will Explore "Primal Needs" of The Aliens

Neill Blomkamp's Alien sequel is known to fans as Alien 5, but it seems highly unlikely to retain that title because it was recently confirmed that the film would ignore the events of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection and instead pick up as a direct sequel to Aliens. Sigourney Weaver, who will reprise her iconic role of Ellen Ripley, spoke a bit more about the movie in a new interview with EW. She reiterated that the film was delayed because Fox wanted Ridley Scott to make Alien: Covenant first, but that the script for their movie is ready and waiting:

"Now that we’re waiting for that, 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. It’s a great story and it’s satisfying to me to give this woman an ending."

That certainly sounds like it has some finality to it, so I'm not sure that fans should hold out hope for this to kickstart a new Ripley-centric trilogy or anything like that.

But for me, the most fascinating thing in this interview was when Weaver talked about Blomkamp's approach to the actual aliens themselves:

“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,” Weaver says. “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.”

If Blomkamp has found a way to give Ripley the ending she deserves and also has time to explore the mentality of the aliens, that sounds like it has loads of potential.

Meanwhile, Weaver elaborated on where this movie will appear in the franchise timeline:

“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,” Weaver says. “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.”

No word yet on exactly when filming will begin, but when EW mentioned that it could be in "a few years" to Weaver, she responded, "I hope it won’t be a few. I hope it’ll be a couple. But we’ll see. Yeah." So if she gets her way, she'll have an extremely busy rest of the decade. We'll keep you posted about this movie when we hear more.