Ridley Scott says future 'Alien' movies will 'drift away from the alien stuff'

Sir Ridley Scott remains convinced he’ll get another shot at the Alien franchise, despite the box office struggles of Alien: Covenant. He also reaffirmed that future films will lean into artificial intelligence themes rather than, you know, aliens.

“We are [going to make another], we are,” Scott told Entertainment Weekly. “I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff.”

“People say, ‘You need more alien, you need more face pulling, need more chest bursting,’ so I put a lot of that in Covenant and it fitted nicely. But I think if you go again you need to start finding another solution that’s more interesting. I think AI is becoming much more dangerous and therefore more interesting.”

Ridley Scott told Yahoo back in May that he was planning two sequels to Covenant with screenwriter John Logan. Those plans later became doubtful after the film failed the set the box office alight.

Alien: Covenant took $240m (£179m), a sharp drop from the $403m (£300m) taken by its predecessor Prometheus in 2012. The Hollywood Reporter later revealed that Fox, the studio responsible for the Alien films, was reassessing plans for two proposed sequels following its lacklustre box office returns.

Scott is gearing up to release true crime drama All The Money In The World, after eleventh hour reshoots to replace Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer. After that he’s due to begin work on Cartel, based on Don Winslow’s The Cartel.

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