Neill Blomkamp has done a fairly frank interview with The Guardian while promoting his latest film, Demonic. Blomkamp’s last film was 2015’s Chappie which performed okay at the box office but received generally negative reviews. The director was asked about his cancelled Alien sequel and suggests that Ridley Scott saw Chappie and realised that his Alien film wasn’t a project worth pursuing: “It’s possible that Ridley watched Chappie and he was like, this guy can’t do Alien so let’s just go ahead and move on,”
Ripley & Hicks confront Mercenary
His Alien film was going to retcon Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection and bring back both Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn in the roles of Ripley and Hicks. Blomkamp goes onto mention feeling sorry for Sigourney Weaver who really liked what he had done.
“I also felt bad for Sigourney because she was really into what I had brought forward… I felt like [for] audiences who loved Aliens, there was an opportunity to do one more film with Sigourney in a way that may have satiated what people were looking for and what I think I was looking for…. What doesn’t make sense is that I feel like it’s what the audience wanted so it’s strange because Fox would never really turn down money.”
Blomkamp does sound a little upset about how the project ended, having worked on it for two years, only for it to be abandoned. He hasn’t spoken to Ridley Scott since then and refuses to get involved in another studio’s intellectual property, having also had problems trying to get Halo off the ground too.
“Not after, no no no, there’s no coming back from that… I’m not gonna work on a film for two years and have the rug pulled out from underneath me and then go hang out and have beers. It’s exactly why I don’t want to do IP based on other people’s stuff ever again… I’m sure they will make many films with that piece of IP, it just doesn’t include me.”
Blomkamp also appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and said a similar thing about Chappie. Blomkamp ‘announced’ his Alien project in early 2015, posting concept art on his Instagram account. Ridley Scott was taking a wait and see approach and wanted to get Alien Covenant done first. Cut to 2017, the project was long dead with 20th Century Fox no longer pursuing it. A huge amount of Alien 5 concept art has come out over the years though, showing what could have been.
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Right
Villeneuve (unlike Blomkamp) did "get to play in Ridley Scott's universe". 2049 then proceeded to bomb at the box office and what happens? Villeneuve gets to make another big-budget film based on one of the best sci-fi novels ever written (that also happens to be Villeneuve's favourite book),
Now Dune is getting rave reviews and Warner media have assured Villeneuve that he'll still get to make part two even if Dune underperforms at the box office.
Whereas Blomkamp has numerous big sci-fi projects that never came to fruition, Halo, Alien 5, Robocop, D9 sequel and now his latest film is getting negative reviews.
So one can understand why Blomkamp would be feeling a wee bit jealous towards this fellow Canadian director. Still very bad form to lash out at him like that.
The first rule of the internet - you can't understand sarcasm or serious things without a smile. He don't put the smile = he can be serious.
Denis, that is.
Also agreed with this. Very fun idea that honestly could have carried a (much better) movie in its own right, that is ultimately cast aside here and nothing of note is done with it. It all just feels so arbitrary in the end.
And where visuals and satire are usually Blomkamp's stronger suits, even in Elysium which I'd say was his weakest outing prior to Demonic, there's literally nothing intetesting at play in the way of either of those assets here.
I'll still check out whatever he does next, since I dig District 9 and Chappie... and Elysium has its moments. I want to see Blomkamp do more cool, oddball things, and the intent behind this one, to do something small in scale while the world was shut down with limited resources, was admirable I guess, but this one ain't it, Neill. And I don't think his Alien movie would have been it, either.
Neill seems to have kind of gone the way of M. Night Shyamalan, it seems (a much more apt comparison than the Paul W.S. Anderson comparison I see people throwing around occasionally).
https://s9.gifyu.com/images/chappie-yolandi-1.gif
sounds like a career killer.
So I can only assume he was so shocked by it that he will never ever speak a single word about Blomkamp ever again.
The mercenaries look like standard enemies from Cyberpunk 2077
Nothing unique about them.
And the stuff that is unique, like the biomechanical suits.. just looks embarrassing.
There's nothing in this about sexuality gone wrong, or anything else that makes the alien really interesting..
It would've been a story about RIpley defeating the BIG COMPANY!
directed by a rich kid.. who simps for Elon Musk.
If this is true then I wonder what would happen if Ridley were to watch this?
Chappie was a master piece in comparison to this movie.
Or canon if it turns out to be excellent. Either way, I'd be all in for an animated tale!
Exactly.
The fact that Hicks and Newt die is what makes Aliens fan boys denounce and hate it, but really, the story was always about Ripley and this was Ripley's ending. That's it.
This idea's successful in no reality with the mainstream audiences.
Genisys made most of its money from China, for the same reason Transformers makes a lot, schlock trash.
I still think comparing this to Dark Fate is somewhat misguided. I'm personally confident that Dark Fate would have made more money if Terminator Genisys didn't exist several years prior with the same James Cameron proclaiming to audiences that this is the true T3 again. Call it the Suicide Squad effect, Tomb Raider effect, what have you.
The correct comparison to me in the Terminator world to Blomkamp's Alien film is Arnold's return after 12 years to Terminator Genisys. It made $440 Million worldwide (enough to greenlight a course correction film) after two poisonous trailers, poisonous reviews and poisonous word of mouth. Now imagine if it was good. Maybe we'd be anticipating a Furiousa/Newt film right now.
I hope you enjoy the two whole unignored posts in the Furiosa thread.
And.... onto my ignore list.
I brought up Dark Fate specifically in response to a response someone made about the studio (that currently being Disney, of course) finding this iteration too "interesting and risky a concept for a studio to support," and I was just pointing out that Dark Fate's release aligns pretty well with the aftermath of Disney's acquisition of Fox, and represents many of the factors as to why I can't see Disney/20th Century Studios imagining that Blomkamp's film would have been any more financially viable than any other attempt at Alien at the time.
Like Terminator, the Alien box office has been dwindling as of late. Covenant couldn't even make enough money to make a direct sequel to that viable, and the last stab at the Terminator franchise with the series leads in place didn't do anything at all to help out in that franchise's case. Why should that be different in Alien's case? How many more people would actually flock to Blomkamp's film than did Covenant solely for Ripley and Hicks?
This kind of semi-franchise reboot with the original leads back only really worked financially with an R-rated film in Halloween's case in 2018, but that's a much cheaper to make horror movie as opposed to the big budget R-rated sci-fi that was Dark Fate. Halloween was a financial success with two sequels immediately green lit and Dark Fate was a financial disaster, despite the two making roughly the same amount of money domestically. Alien isn't really any bigger a franchise than either of those and would likely make roughly the same amount as they did (just as Covenant's box office numbers sit very comfortably alongside both Dark Fate's and Halloween's), but it would cost much closer to Dark Fate's budget to make than it would Halloween's.
A given? Arnold was 68 years old! Nah, the last time Arnold had played a Terminator was in 2003 in "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines". (No one counts that horrible cg "Arnold" face that was on screen for a collective 30 seconds in "Terminator Salvation".) So Arnold's return was not a given, especially at that age in a reboot, but in conversations with Cameron, Ellison and Cameron's friend writer Laeta Kalogridis, it was a necessity. So staying uncredited, Cameron came up with a way for Arnold to return in Terminator Genisys... where Terminators can age, etc. And the top billing attraction of the film was the young Arnold versus old Arnold fight. (Nice CG!)
So you have Cameron's idea of the T800 aging in "Terminator Genisys", Cameron in the forefront of promoting "Terminator Genisys" raving about the film and that he considers it the true T3 third movie in the franchise, and the 1984 Arnold fighting a 2015 Arnold. Just plain awesome! (Until many saw the reviews or movie)
Then 4 years later, they do the same thing again? James Cameron is back saying "Terminator Dark Fate" is the real T3 again. Arnold is back as an aging cybernetic organism again. The trailers look bad again. But this time we brought back Linda Hamilton? Yeah, pass... like so many did. So I think what you're doing is not a fair apples to apples comparison.
Anyway, the poor box office of Alien Covenant was likely the final nail in Blomkamp's Alien film coffin way back in 2017... two years before you could even buy a ticket for Terminator Dark Fate.
Isn't it similar to that time when he saw AVP ? 🤔
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Arnold had been in all of the bad ones right though. His return in Dark Fate was no different than him coming back in Rise of the Machines or Genisys. His return was a given.
The presence of Hamilton and Cameron is what actually differentiated it from past movies. And it still bombed. Like the Terminator movies being a few installments removed from Hamiltion, Alien was a few removed from Sigourney. But at the end of the day, the general audience doesn't care about whether it's a reboot or a sequel or what have you. It's just another new installment in a franchise that had been seeing diminishing returns.
Below Right: Ridley Scott photographed while watching Chappie:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DwkuMo_VYAAmHa9?format=jpg&name=large
Interesting though... Chappie was a unmitigated mullet fest. Then along comes Raised by Wolves & The Last Duel and what do we get? Mullets...
Hmm. I don't personally think it's the same exact situation.
First I love Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor. But while fantastic, Linda was never the international draw or the star. Arnold Schwarzenegger had always been the title draw in the Terminator franchise, and Sigourney Weaver in Alien is more equivalent to him, than to her.
But to be the same exact situation, Sigourney would have tried to retcon Alien 3 twice. If you recall Terminator Genisys with Arnold in 2015 retconned T3 & Salvation to a tally of 440 Million, but audiences were turned off to its casting and quality. But it made enough worldwide to justify another try. So in 2019, they retconned both T3 & Salvation again with Dark Fate with a tally of $261 Million and clearly at that point, collectively, audiences started having enough.
Threadly reminder that if you wanted this movie, these are the people who agree with you.
Thanks for the link!