It looks like Twentieth Century Fox has gotten its way. The studio balked when a fifth “Alien” movie was brought to it with a director not named Ridley Scott attached, and said it wouldn’t front the bill for the movie unless Scott changed his mind. Hey, who says the studio doesn’t have the power to make things happen? Variety now reports that Scott has indeed been attached to take over the directorial chores on the prequel, which will now move forward.
The trade also reports that sci-fi thriller wunderkind Jon Spaihts has been hired to pen the script, which will take place before the events of the 1979 original “Alien” movie, the last time Scott directed an installment in the franchise, which counts four entries so far. In the original, the crew of a commercial towing ship called Nostromo is returning to Earth when it is awakened and sent to check out a distress signal from a nearby alien planet. They find an abandoned alien ship, but upon their return to the Nostromo, discovers that one of them has been infected by an alien parasite that quickly grows into a dangerous, two-legged killer.
There have been four films in the franchise so far, including James Cameron’s “Aliens”, David Fincher’s “Alien 3″, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Alien Resurrection”. The last movie was released in 1997, but the franchise has lived on in the “Alien vs. Predator” franchise, which pitted the acid-spewing aliens of “Alien” against the technologically more advanced hunters of the “Predator” franchise, which is itself getting a reboot from Robert Rodriguez.
Below: “Oh relax guys, so it’s a dead alien spaceship filled with weird looking eggs. What’s the worst that could happen?”
