Director Neill Blomkamp has released new concept art for a new Alien movie he is working on that features Sigourney Weaver in the leading role as Ellen Ripley and Michael Biehn as Corporal Hicks.
Sharing the photo on Instagram, Blomkamp wrote, “Alien going very well. Love this project.”
Blomkamp is creating the new Alien film with Ridley Scott, creator of the original Alien movie and the 2012 prequel Prometheus, set to produce. The District 9 director teased the project in January this year by posting concept images he had worked on for an Alien movie that never saw the light of day (these images have since been taken down). He elaborated that “they,” presumably Fox, didn’t even know he was working on it. Later, it was announced that Blomkamp would actually be making an Alien movie with Sigourney Weaver set to return to her iconic role.
The appearance of both Weaver as Ripley and Biehn as Corporal Hicks in this latest piece of concept art points to [SPOILER WARNING] some creative changes for the third and fourth Alien films. Blomkamp has said that his film is to be set after Aliens, the second film in the franchise. What this means for the continuity of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection is almost anyone’s guess for now, but Blomkamp shed a little bit of light on the subject while simultaneously teasing more than one new Alien movie in an interview with Empire while he was promoting his latest sci-fi flick Chappie, which also stars Weaver.
“When I met Sigourney [Weaver] on the set of Chappie, I presumed that she would never want to play Ripley again… I also didn’t know where you could go with her, given Alien 3 and 4. When I started to speaking to her, I just wanted to know more about the process of making the first two films. The first two are the ones that I care about. Then I started to realize there was a whole film – at least a film, if not more – that still contained Ripley, which I was really surprised by.”
The latest video game to use the Alien license was last year’s Alien: Isolation made by The Creative Assembly, which surpassed 2.1 million copies sold in May of this year. To read more about it, check out our review. Previous to Isolation, Gearbox Software released Aliens: Colonial Marines. Recently, Gearbox president Randy Pitchford made clear his opinion on the lawsuit that resulted from the release and subsequent backlash from consumers of Colonial Marines.
