In a recent editorial about Ridley Scott’s production company, Scott Free, The Hollywood Reporter talked with the director about his past and future projects.
Scott praised his longtime relationship working with 20th Century Studios:
Scott’s longtime track record with 20th, now owned by Disney, isn’t an accident. The director’s first hit, 1979’s Alien, was at the studio, and he’s been loyal to the company through many upheavals over the decades. “I think I’ve done 13 films for Fox, which may be the highest number any director has done for a studio,” Scott says. “It’s a bit like opening a restaurant. When they pay your overhead, you better eat there every night. I eat at my table every night with Fox. I think that’s why I’ve been valuable to them. You win some, you lose some, but overall, they have been rewarded for what I do.”
Riding high off the success of Alien: Romulus, and also producing next year’s FX Alien: Earth series from showrunner Noah Hawley, Scott isn’t slowing down as a filmmaker and producer. A sequel to his 2000 blockbuster and Best Picture winner Gladiator releases next month.
A snippet of the editorial caught our eye in which Scott told THR that he’s developing a new Alien film:
Scott also revealed he’s developing a new Alien movie for 20th in the wake of Romulus’ success, plus a Battle of Britainfilm being written by Joe Penhall, as well as the previously announced thriller Bomb from Kevin McMullin.
While Scott may simply be referring to returning to produce a sequel to Alien: Romulus from director Fede Álvarez, recently mentioned by studio head Steve Asbell as in being in talks, we have to wonder if perhaps this is another project entirely. Might we see Ridley Scott finally return to the director’s chair for Alien? Perhaps to finish his prequel series or take on another idea entirely? Only time will tell.
Thanks to Who’sNick, Mike’sMonsters, and chrisandy for the news. Keep your browsers locked on Alien vs. Predator Galaxy for the latest Alien news! You can follow us on Facebook, X, Instagram and YouTube to get the latest on your social media walls. You can also join in with fellow Alien and Predator fans on our forums.
Yeah I respect that, and I agree with a lot of the criticisms of the Engineers/ space jockeys. Things could have been handled differently in certain ways. Although, I'm not sure I agree with you on the comments about Ridley just making a movie with the intent to piss people off or that he enjoys messing with things to stir conversation, even if he is quoted saying something in an antagonizing way. I'd like to believe since this is all clearly just opinions that he is very respectful of his own iconic creation in Alien and as a cerebral filmmaker he tries to push the boundaries of his own work and lore, in this case Alien. I think he also knows some people won't agree with his decisions but to him it's his property to work with.
Either way, there's a lot to say about Prometheus, its good and bad aspects. As an Alien fan first, I still enjoyed the tone and feeling of what Prometheus was, that feeling of curiosity and discovery and the harmony of that throughout the film.
Plus I enjoyed the music.
Yep, exactly this. An old problematic trope (Sarcasm: Ancient non white people being smart and resourceful?! Not possible...), and frankly quite preposterous cause it takes that ridiculous Ancient Aliens stuff and turns it into a film. And even then, Prometheus could've been so much more and we get a Derelict that's more stony than biomechanical, making it more boring than the version in Alien IMO. And then in Covenant we're all waiting for that home-world, that Paradise and we get one small, stone Greco-Roman city...
So even with using the ancient aliens stuff he made it very boring looking instead of horrific and unique in the visuals. It should've been an elephant man...
#returntheelephantman
I have a friend that ONLY likes Prometheus. It was his intro into the Alien universe, and to him the Alien movies felt small scale in comparison to what Prometheus was setting up.
From his perspective, I suppose this makes sense.
From my perspective, Prometheus was a shotgunning of ideas that almost completely missed the target.
My gripe is not really that people like the movie. I'm glad people got enjoyment out of it. But it is kind of the blind assumption by its fans that it is a great movie and MUST be liked by all and one MUST appreciate the brilliance of its ideas.
I also don't think Scott is respectful of the lore. I think he enjoys f**king with things because good or bad it stirs the pot of conversation. The fifteen foot jockeys being reduced to 10' tall Mr Xs, the introduction of a magic creature making black goo, the David is the creator of the Aliens etc. These don't feel respectful to me. They felt like Ridley deliberately was trying to shock the audience by tossing cold water on them.
Prometheus IS talked about though, so that play by play DOES work. I just don't care for it. The Donald Trump of Alien film directing. "Let me just say,write,direct some shit I know will piss people off."
As obviously unintentional/lacking self-awareness as it is on this, it actually adds to Prometheus for me as a piece of media. Playing the whole Von Daniken ideology completely straight.
Yeah I do agree with this, the Neomorphs worked, they added depth and connected things without making it overtly obvious. The Praetomorph which I felt was fun to watch failed at that for the reason you stated, you can feel Ridleys contempt bringing back an Alien.
Movie one: oh shit, guys in suits?
Movie two: oh shit, Android creators?
Movie three: No, the real Gods appear with the real weapon.
I'd say Covenant would be better off as that film, just cutting out the Alien and having David refine the neomorphs.
You can feel Ridley's contempt bringing the Alien back in that film, and it only hurts both the creature and the movie.
Same, Prometheus was a unique experience. I enjoyed the message, tone but most importantly the integral curiosity and discovery of the film with both their corresponding conflict and harmony. It didn't follow the Alien name or Alien format which made it feel unique and original and all while still connecting it to Alien. One thing about Ridley is, he's going to make the movie he wants to make while still being respectful to the lore and what has been - and I personally respect that.
But the best he could do was imperialistic white men.
I really just can't take Prometheus as anything audacious or invigorating. It took the easiest tropes of celestial colonialism and slapped them into a series built on a Lovecraftian sense of the cosmos.
I was going by that strangely dressed fellow of questionable attire in your avatar.
I will try to remember. Not because I am trying to be a dick if I say otherwise, but because I honestly just forget things.
Reboot time.
I am more than eager for a future project to undercut that.
(Their sidekick. I'm nonbinary, I go by they/them.)
I don't like thinking about it. But when I'm watching it I can go along for the ride and enjoy it.
But when the ride is over the dullness washes over me and all I can think is that for all of Giger's creativity and imagination, which Scott so rightly employed, all we could get out of it at the end was white dudes colonising space.
Sil. A champion of the people.
he gets along that way too.
but back to the topic:
I'm still on Scott's side because I like his ideas. For me, the whole thing would be completely reversed if he were to delete the existing cinematic canon.
(well, aliens and everything after)
Of course that can happen and if you read his statements about the subsequent films, it can worry you as a fan.
I'm still amazed at how much he claims to have omnipotence over the franchise.
He neither invented it nor has the right to claim it.
Back then, he got things on the right track by fighting for Giger's vision and often pushing through the right decisions. But even if Scott had had complete freedom with the first film, some things wouldn't have gone so well. I'll just say the talking alien at the end. that would have ruined it.
I can live with the prequel storys very well so far, but it depends on how they pursue it further.
The only audacious thing about it was revealing the Jockey was a man in a suit. Which was equally boring - it's just humans all the way down, nothing challenging or interesting.
As Stanislaw Lem wrote, "We don't want other worlds: we want mirrors." Prometheus is the epitome of that sentiment. Which is particularly unpalatable given the original film was about humanity as a small speck on a cosmic ocean, its only hint of intelligent life some dead thing in a spaceship with a cargo of parasitic, animal terror.
Covenant making the Alien an AI made by AI is at least an interesting idea and one that hasn't been worn to death (and one interestingly already posited by one of those films Scott said wasted the franchise.)
Prometheus is a pseudo-intellectual mess of half-baked, poorly plotted ideas that sacrificed the unpretentious simplicity that made the franchise effective for banal, asinine naval-gazing.
You can be his sidekick.
Even the big change of the engineers is just Mr X from Resident Evil 2 walking around.
The only thing unique and new about it is that he took about 20 ripped ideas and threw them into a singular movie. The uniqueness being that is some kind of scifi record for unoriginality. That spilled together witches brew of dogshit afterwards isn't some masterpiece. It is a barely functional/disguised attempt at hijacking a franchise and turning it into something else.
Then he was so disappointed that the studio was gonna make him do another alien movie that he jumped ship for years afterwards when he COULD've finished the prequel trilogy and made the crazy ass tv series he actually wanted to make with Prometheus in Raised by Wolves. Or maybe he couldn't because Covenant was such a flop. Hard to tell these days.
He just tried to pump the alien series to get asses in seats and then was mad that the series fans, the series that he used for its name, wanted aliens (the titular creature mind you) in the next movies.
People are doing for him in the Alien series what people think Trump is gonna do for the states. But instead of talking about low gas prices, and food actually priced in a reasonable price range and not half a paycheck every time you stop, they are constantly hoping that Scott can land on the magic of the first two films. That hasnt happened yet. And isn't going to happen. Scott believes himself to be so elevated and so transcendent of mere Alien movies that he will never approach the level of moviemaking that was Alien again. Which should be a major redflag for anybody hiring him, to you know, direct an Alien movie.
It's a nostalgia grab, that he can't ever seem to hit on nowadays because he sucks at telling Alien movies.
Yeah Scott takes risk. But risk only pays off if you succeed. He isn't the SAS. He dares, but he doesn't win.
They gave Scott Covenant but you knew they were worried because a HUGE portion of the fanbase was like, "Where da alienz?" Fans dumb? Yes. Scott dumb for trying to make a prequel in the Alien universe and not have Aliens? Yes.
When Covenant ended up being even MORE weird than Prometheus, and didn't make any money, that killed the series for almost a decade.
Romulus is only somewhat successful because it is SUPER formulaic. The opposite of what Scott is. I consider all the prequels varying levels of bad. You need someone not as wild as Scott at this point, and not somebody not so formulaic that he steals the best parts from the rest of the series and has his nose up Scotts ass.
Fed might've been better had Scott not been around. But the studios are so scared to do anything without scott that Romulus probably never would've been made.
What drives me even crazier is that Scott wouldn't make the same Prometheus today that he did in 2012. He wouldn't have even made the same Alien. That is how much of a waffling goofball he is.
He'd have the crew land on Acheron, read some kind of scroll, gradually turn into an alien while person meditated, and then flay the skin of the rest of the crew with the powers of his mind as he floated cross legged around the ship.
LIKE GET OUT OF HERE WITH THAT SHIT RIDLEY. Just make your own movie for god sake and leave Alien series alone.
Edit: Actually I'm going to use floating man changing alien in my own story that I never write, yall leave that alone.
https://media.mpcvfx.com/app/uploads/2022/04/O_028_dp_300_v11-1280x560.jpg
And then it crashes this magnitude and magnificence against the (usual for this series) body horror, putting humans back in their place as meat, biomass only fit to be used in larger processes by more powerful entities. It is an absolutely sinister and cynical answer to existential inquiries which possesses its own kind of morbid beauty.
https://expedientmeans.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/prometheus-3.jpg
Prometheus also proposes a movie almost entirely devoid of the emblematic Alien monster. The 1979 nightmare is only present through echoes, most of them being peripheral and of no consequence to the main plot and action. You could remove the Fifield abomination and the Deacon particularly without changing the story structure... and Damon & Ridley probably should have, for these superfluous elements are one of the main aesthetical and narrative weaknesses of the work(along with the well-know plotholes).
It's a brave move to choose to NOT rely on the Alien, and given previous exchanges ("The Alien is cooked", "the problem is that every single movie in this franchise features them, in the exact same way", you already know, SiL, that it's one I entirely welcome, and that it's one I even think necessary for the franchise to develop.
https://spaces.filmstories.co.uk/uploads/2024/04/alien-wide-shot.jpg
Additionally, the movie takes a few radical positions that people will hate or love, such as the Space Jockey fossil in Alien being retconned into a biomechanical spacesuit for human-like extraterrestrial, superhuman creatures who seed the cosmos with life (tying back to the "ancient astronauts" conspiracy theory and to a lot of popular UFO mythology), the Derelict ship being retconned into a bomber loaded with bioweapons, or a "black liquid" (inspired by the black oil in X-Files?), a mutagenic substance turning lifeforms into contagious, predatory abominations.
Personally I'm not entirely happy with these positions, for various reasons - I like the Engineer design but I dislike abandoning the elephantine profile, I think it's a mistake to explain all of the remaining mysteries of Alien, etc - but they are risk takings. They sweep over decades of extended universe works and fanon imagination and impose new facts upon what we thought we knew.
Despite its imperfections, Prometheus is a complete and bold new proposition.
Alien: Covenant is pretentious, predictable, unimaginative and doesn't have half of the beauty and audacity of the previous movie.
It's like if Natalie Portman was born from a ten dollar meth addicted hooker.
He believes that there are people who failed him and he cannot film the prequel ?
"Then I went back with Alien: Covenant, and that was big and ambitious and maybe too intellectual to play as well. It still did $250 million, and I still stupidly didn't lock it up. I don't blame me, because I'm busy. I blame a couple other people, which is why we parted company."
So he brags about the end of Covenant but at the same time says he's not thinking about that right now , It does not depend on him, and that his next movie is about a music band.
Another issue is that David8 could appear in Romulus II in some way.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/ridley-scott-interview-gladiator-2-alien-blade-runner-1236049190/
You're right, I don't like them. I love them.
I didn't mean that either.
However, there is a difference between a director wanting to contribute something truly new and making it appear visually like a work of art.
Romulus looks fantastic, but Scott's imagery is more artistic, visually like a painting. Alvarez had made things a little easier for himself.
Scott dares much more.
The popularity of each film remains an open question, but Scott often treats it like a work of art.
I think of Covenant's homage to Böckling's painting or that the flower that David places on Shaw's grave looks like an alien egg.
Of course it's primarily about success, i.e. commerce, but it depends on how it's packaged to call it artful.
Romulus is a beautiful comic while Prometheus and Covenant are sophisticated paintings.
And that, in my opinion, is where the difference lies in general from the Predator series and also from the audience.
There are people who are annoyed by what Scott did with it, they want to see Alien action.
I think the young audience in particular is increasingly inclined towards this, which certainly supports the success of Romulus.
Then there are the "philosophers" who welcomed the fact that the Alien series was raised to this level by Scott and wanted to move away from the everyday Alien style.
Personally, I think a well-dosed mixture would be the right direction for further films.
it is not impossible and can be commercially successful.
Well, not that I don't like Scott's entries, but according to fan polls, he did it back in 2012
I don't know where this notion has come from lately that Alien was made as some kind of studio-backed arthouse production - it was made as a crowd-pleasing horror film.
He's always brought his keen eye for composition and visual storytelling to those productions. He's always tried to put as much art in front of the lens as possible. But it's always been in service of telling a story that audience goers will pay money to see.
The biggest differences are that Scott's personal interests have changed as he got older - of course they have - and he's rarely having to butt hears over ideas with the reputation and clout he's built up.
He's also just never been particularly wonderful at coming up with stories. Telling them, yes. Developing them, no.
Although I like Romulus, it's more Alvarez and Disney who made a commercial out of it.
The problem, however, is that Ridley has an ego problem and acts as if he is responsible for the franchise. But he absolutely doesn't have that. He can continue to make great films and complete his trilogy, but he still has to stick to the existing material and not cancel anything.
What I mean here is the existence of the Queen as we have come to know and love it.
that's the problem.
why didn't WY send a special team?
why do they leave the station to its fate?
It's not impossible to resolve it, but I'm concerned that it might not even come up in another film.
Spoiler
This sentence reads like producer-minded, "content first" speak to me, honestly.
"Want[ing] it for his own ends" is an artistically driven mindset. The "health of the franchise" just feels like a product coming off of an assembly line.
His recent comments about not 'locking down' the franchise also say a lot to me. He wants it for his own ends, not what's necessarily best for the health of the franchise.
I'd also understand if others feel differently however.