As Alien Romulus continues to bring home the accolades and awards, work continues behind-the-scenes on the next entry in the Alien pantheon. Talking to ScreenRant at the Saturn Awards (where Romulus won “Best Horror Film”), one of the film’s producers Michael Pruss talked about how development continued on the next film, and that they’re entertaining concepts that aren’t direct sequels.
I am involved in the sequel with Ridley and our friends and colleagues and Fede, course. We are working on ideas for another Alien film, which may not be a direct sequel to Romulus, but it certainly is a part of the existing franchise.
At the moment we’re doing what I call “sitting around tables and drinking water.” We’re discussing ideas. Good movies take time, and I just worked on Gladiator II, and that took 25 years to conjure up a sequel. It takes a period of time to really examine ideas and understand if those ideas are worth pushing. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they aren’t, and we just have to submit to the best idea.
We are in an early phase, but we hope to really have something special to talk about as the year goes on. I promise it won’t be 25 years; it’ll be sooner than that, but I don’t have more specifics. We aren’t yet in more of a specific phase than just working with Fede and Ridley to try and come up with something great that will frankly garner the same reaction. Romulus was worth the wait, right? People loved it, they embraced it, and so it takes time to do it. But we want to give you something great.
Michael Pruss poses alongside Alien Romulus writer/director Fede Alvarez & head of 20th Century Studios Steve Asbell.
When writer and director Fede Alvarez last updated us on the status of the sequel for Alien Romulus, he told Empire that he was excited to explore future story directions: “Wherever we go now, we can go into uncharted waters.” That’s not to say Fede was suggesting he was excited to throw away Andy and Rain. In the same article, he also hinted at their return.
“I think it’ll be so exciting to go with characters you know from this movie, to a place in the Alien franchise that we’ve never been before, and to discover things that you’ve never seen before.”
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Gonna go back and try on something a bit more difficult before the sequel releases, though.
I don't choose to play like that - I just suck and like to live as long as possible.
Stompy prick just comes right back into the room every time I come out of hiding and gives me a coronary.
It's an inside-of-a-locker/ under-a-table simulator.
I'm simply saying after Alien and Aliens I think Isolation would have been a great way to throw a third film in there.
Or you could place it where Rez was put.
The story's functional, but it's not that vibrant. It succeeds on the basis of the tension, tension created from mechanics, that exist because of the unique artificial intelligence.
I think in terms of pure immersion you have the Metro Trilogy, Mirror's Edge and Isolation that's totally all encompassing in the manner their act of playing makes for the story.
But again I think "immersion" only works on a personal basis as quite a thin descriptor.
I especially do not agree that it works well as a middle part of the Ripley narrative structure, it is a story about closure and best experienced after all the films featuring Sigourney Weaver exactly where it sits.
You're basically playing an alien movie. Which is why I wish this would have been made a movie.
Everything from set design, soundtrack, the way the alien is portrayed, to the story is the best since the first two films. In any media after aliens it's number 3 for me.
If this was a film it would be Alien, Isolation, and Aliens as my perfect trilogy
I will say that I still think the insurance angle works better for the universe. It's corporate mundanity at its most mundane, which serves to keep the story grounded.
If we have to reference the surviving family members of the Nostromo crew at all, I'd just say they won a class-action judgment against Weyland-Yutani, which the insurance company had to pay out.
Though a separate character would have been fine, the story of Sevastopol and the Alien itself makes it seamless to put honestly anyone as the main character. Hell you could have played as one of the station personnel during the outbreak and it would have been good.
Sidebar, they made the game for mobile phones and I replayed it all. Highly recommend getting it for that if you don't have console. It's probably the most immersive game in the Alien world where it captivates the feel, horror and tension of what we all felt thinking about the original Alien and being caught inside the Nostromo with that thing.
Not much else to say. I haven't even played Isolation.
Just wondering if the game would be significantly changed if you replaced Amanda with a character written to fit the situation as well or better than she was, but without the forced legacy baggage that seems to pervade this franchise.
https://i.imgur.com/RmdQvKM.jpeg
Not that I do not like the narrative, I really really do.
What alien isolation did and romulus did to a point is make the alien scary again. They both made us fear the xeno as we did back in 1979. A sequel to romulus or covenant needs to create the fear factor again. That may not be so easy though...
My headcanon is that David merely recreated the alien. Will other movies or licensed alien media uphold that or contradict that going forward? Probably yes to both. The producers, directors, and writers kind of make it up as they go along. If something doesn't work for their story, it will simply be ignored.
There is more life in the genre; at least, I am still interested. Why would any of us be here otherwise? Here, we tend to focus on things like canon, but most of the creative process is about crafting characters and making the audience care about what is happening in the story, keeping the right pacing, how to show what is happening without relying on info dumping dialogue, and so on.
Overall, I liked Romulus, and the main thing I didn't care for was the reusing of iconic lines. I don't really mind if the next story doesn't directly include Rain or Andy. To me the alien is the star.
It should probably also be noted that one of the biggest complaints leveled at Wolf Man has to do with how minimally it bothered actually engaging with the fact that it is werewolf movie. It likely would have done better if it was more of a monster movie.
Bring on Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. Bring on Predator: Badlands. Bring on the Godzilla: Minus One followup. Bring on Werwulf. I always yearn for a good creature feature, in any shape or form that it may take.
I've said it many times but I don't have any issues with David creating an offshoot of the xenomorph i just hate the idea he created the xenomorph race. I think there is enough evidence to suggest he didn't.
A sequel to Romulus that ties in with Covenant could work. Rain and Andy meeting David could be cool if handled right. I think it could be.
I also agree with a post about a sequel post Alien 3 focusing on other characters in the galaxy. No reason why we can't have two additional movies.
As a side note The Wolfman is a terrible movie, it's not that monster movies are dead it's this was a terrible film. Romulus proved that there is still life in the genre yet.
Is not just crew doing amazing stupid things, its they way it obliterates all the interesting stuff of prometheus.
Killed the engineers, and showed them living in some kind of ancient primitive city (75% of the film location is a wet cave??). No suits, no interesting tech etc...just ancient sumerian kinf of stuff.
And all the "Dr Moreau Island" thing is so off with the alien lore...
And that little alien with his arms waving..."Offcourse evil android, i was about to kill you, but sure i will look at that menacing alien egg becouse you tell me".
I cant...so many things.
I'm with you although I do love Prometheus - Something about that movie always resonated with me.
There is no menace, no mystery.
Monsters are not scary anymore. We have evolved beyond that mode of fear!
Humanity is the only REAL monster left.
Look at the most successful horror films. They are not about something SILLY like a big dumb strange CREATURE!
The Wolf Man just FLOPPED, PEOPLE!
The monster movie is DEAD!
For this franchise to survive it must embrace David's story as a reflection of THE ALIENNESS OF MAN!
Fox must heed MY WARNINGS!
I love Covenant, unabashedly.
I still find the theories in the RPG pretty interesting, even though I know that the film canon doesn't take this into account.
And the film canon is more important to me than the secondary media.
Even though it certainly wasn't resolved optimally, at least so far it hasn't been the case that a film has been completely ignored.
That's also the reason why I would like to see David again, whether in a short version or as a focused storyline.
There's no guarantee that it will be good or bad in the end anyway, whether with or without a Covenant reference.
IMO, of course.
In my opinion, Prometheus is an extremely interesting proposal because, it focuses on exploring the origins of Alien and bringing to life what originally unsettled us, expanding that sense of "cosmic horror" without breaking the magic that defines it. However, with Covenant, that magic fades as it introduces the theory that David is the creator of the Xenomorph.
While it is true that the expanded lore, as presented in the latest instalment of the role-playing game, suggests that the Space Jockeys seen in Alien are not exactly the same Engineers that appear in Prometheus, and that the creature created by David in Covenant is not strictly the Xenomorph but rather a "Protomorph," I believe that this lore—now classified as canon—has been adapted to ensure coherence, relying on additional material beyond the films. This contrasts with the original statements made by those responsible for the projects at the time of their execution.
then you probably followed the same optical fallacy as I did when I first saw ALIEN.
at the time I thought that the egg chamber was a cave under the derelict. because the size of the ship and that of the egg chamber didn't match up for me at the time.
reinforced by Kane's statement:
"it's a kind of cave..."
so I thought that LV 426 was the origin of the alien.
only later, when I heard the first audio commentary in which Scott said that the ship was a kind of bomber that transported the eggs, was it clear that they had been brought along.
Romulus definitely not only lured old hands to the cinema but also found a new audience.
However, this situation led to new interested parties catching up on the old films to find out more.
I also don't think that the focus will be too much on the Covenant sequel. For me it would be completely sufficient if it were mentioned, but cleverly woven in.
From a commercial point of view, I agree that it probably couldn't be mentioned at all.
But Fede himself once said that he basically likes all Alien films and likes to connect everything together.
So as a Covenant supporter, I still have hope that it won't completely rot away in the dead of night.
And David doesn't have to be the jockey either.
He's an android and so far they've never been facehugged.
The Derelict can be mentioned in various other ways.
although I'm really not 100% sure what Ridley had planned.
I remember an interview where he said that after Covenant the development of the creature was almost complete.
Almost.
It's striking that the alien at the end of Covenant has no biomechanical elements.
Where would these have come from?
OK, it could also be through the fusion with the jockey at the beginning of Alien.
But then he probably wouldn't be an engineer either, but the real jockey that the engineers just worship, imitate, whatever.
but how the hell did it become xenomorph prime?!
That is the TRUE origin planet.
Nope, the true origin planet of the species that infected the first Space Jockey. I don't want to follow the idea that David created the Xenomorph species. Not a huge fan of the Queen tho... I prefer the ovomorphing etc.
The one with the queen mother and the palatines just chilling in those pod things?
I would love to see Andy vs David. That would be fun to watch.
The Derelict ship could have survived the nuke, maybe just partially buried but still intact.
Fassbender (and dangling threads from Covenant) appearing in the film would not in any way strip from this movie its nature as a direct sequel to Romulus, centered around the further exploits of Rain and Andy. But as evidenced in Romulus, Fede is pretty into what Ridley was cooking in Prometheus and Romulus (and we know that 20th Century Studios head Steve Asbell feels the very same), and public interest in those prequel films is probably higher now than it ever was during their original releases, given so much of the talk online (in public spaces like the big social media sites, not in dedicated fan groups like here); seeing a sort of merger between where Romulus left off and more of Covenant's dangling elements doesn't feel so out of left field to me. Especially when Romulus is already dripping with Black Goo out of every orifice.
Alien: Earth, on the other hand, I'd never speculate this about, given Noah Hawley's stance on the prequel films. But a Romulus sequel? I'm not saying it's going to happen, just that I wouldn't be shocked if it does...