Neill Blomkamp Reflects On His ‘Aliens’ Sequel That Almost Was

The District 9 director detailed the genesis of and his plans for the canned Alien sequel.

"I met Sigourney on Chappie and I had a different idea for an Alien film I wanted to make. So I had this idea for a story set in the world of those two first films that was not a continuation of James Cameron’s,” Blomkamp explained, digging into the genesis of the project. “It was just in the world of it and it had a totally different character that was the lead character. Because my assumption was that Sigourney would just never make another one. I told her about it on Chappie and she was like ‘No, no, no! I actually would make another one because I felt like Ripley’s story didn’t end correctly.’”

He continued, “So I went back to Vancouver and while I was editing Chappie I started to think about what I would do with Sigourney as basically a sequel to James Cameron’s film. I spent about a year working on it with only Sigourney knowing and I hired one really awesome concept artist. We put together essentially a script and all the artwork and that’s what I went to 20th Century Fox with. They seemed really into it and Ridley [Scott] came on as producer and then it just unraveled... It’s very difficult to speak about on several levels because Ridley created Alien. It was something that inspired me deeply. I got into film because of it... Everything that happened with my script and with the way the film collapsed – it’s hard to talk about it without it seeming like I’m bashing him which is like one of my idols to get into film. It’s a super strange psychological place but films go down in Hollywood all the time. That’s just essentially, I think, what happened and it sucks for me. It’s not that it sucks for Sigourney, it’s not going to make any difference to her, but I think she really did like the story because it allowed Ripley to… it really felt like a cool third film.”

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