You might remember that Ridley Scott suggested he was keen on returning to Australian stages to shoot his third installment in his Prometheus trilogy tentatively titled Alien: Awakening after a positive experience making Alien: Covenant there.
It looks like Ridley wasn’t just blowing his signature cigar smoke.
Omega Underground had learned that at one time Fox was eyeing a Summer 2018 shoot for Scott’s Awakening and now we have more information to support that along with Prometheus/Covenant’s Mark Huffam and Scott Free’s Michael Pruss named as producers.
Our assessment is that Scott and Huffam wanted to return to Fox Studios, Moore Park, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Its current status is unknown.
Here are a couple videos of Mark Huffam’s glowing endorsement of the Australian crew and facilities while filming Covenant.
However, there really isn’t a clear sign that production will be moving forward on the film at this point. We don’t even know if a script exists or has been started by screenwriters.The only tidbit is Ridley suggesting to IGN they had started work on the sequel’s script. He sadly doesn’t name what writer was tasked to work on that.
Speaking to IGN, Scott said that, “we’re writing [a sequel] now, as we speak. I’ll be filming that within 14 months.” When asked if he planned to resolve unanswered questions about the Alien universe in future movies, Scott explained that the story has been left “wide open” by design: “That’s why I’m doing it, so you’re asking these questions.”
Michael Green (Logan, American Gods) had worked closely with Ridley on both Covenant and Blade Runner 2049 scripts, so his return is indeed plausible.
Scott had hinted to multiple sequels before tempering expectations to just Awakening. Covenant’s lower than expected global box office performance in comparison to Prometheus’ seemed to place a giant question mark on the next film even happening. In the box office aftermath, it was reported in July by THR that the studio was “reassessing” the franchise.
Sources say Fox will have to reassess two intended sequels Scott has pitched while he is off helming Getty kidnapping movie All the Money in the World and then drug lord drama The Cartel.
Collider had stated some rumors concerning this reassessing.
A couple months later it seemed that the studio was still interested in taking ideas from Scott.
Here is what 20th Century Fox CEO Stacey Snider had to say to Variety back in September about the prospect of Ridley continuing along with Fox’s Vice Chairmen Emma Watts working on the next one together. This sounds a lot more promising than THR’s report from the summer.
“It was a disappointment, but I trust Ridley [Scott] and Emma [Watts] to know the right story when they find it. When universes are as rich as “Alien,” they can stay in a too familiar groove — in which case you’re in trouble — but they can also find a planet or a storyline or a villain that also lives in that universe that can be groundbreaking.”
More recently, Ridley Scott still seems confident that a version of Awakening will happen but to EntertainmentWeekly suggested that artificial intelligence would likely become the threat, not the xenomorphs.
“We are [going to make another], we are,” Scott told EW from the set of All the Money in the World. “I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff.” Say what? Scott’s Alien: Covenant, which came out earlier this year, felt like a return to some legit old-school scares but failed to set the domestic box office ablaze (though, combined with international sales, it ended with north of $240 million in ticket revenue). “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.”
It’s not hard to come to this conclusion after Michael Fassbender‘s duel performances as androids David and Walter were the biggest standouts of a very uneven film.
Axing the xenomorphs from the sequel could lead to a reduced budget. As we’ve stated in the past, the best way to keep making these Aliens movies is scaling them back a little to become more cost-effective and profitable.
The problem becomes Ridley starts filming The Cartel in March.
Ridley proved with All The Money In The World, that he can still crush a production window and reshoots on a level that would frighten his younger peers. While speaking with EntertainmentWeekly last month Scott teased about shooting three films a year.
“I’d like to do three [films] a year, but we’re going to start the next one in February,” he told the outlet. “I’m not sure if we’re keeping the title because the book is so important, but I’m doing [an adaptation] of The Cartel.”
It’s not impossible if The Cartel wraps before the summer this could happen, but we’re not holding our breath considering the amount of pre-production needed to get this film of this scale ready for a summer shoot. Yet, Ridley seems to be super gung-ho again about the sequel, but who knows how he’ll feel in a couple of months and where Fox stands on paying for the third movie.
Fox might also want to hold off to see how Disney would want to move forward.
SOURCE: OMEGA UNDERGROUND