Ridley Scott is never without a shortage of projects to work on. Right now he’s feverishly doing reshoots on Oscar bait All the Money in the World, and after that he’ll jump into an adaptation of Don Winslow’s The Cartel. But earlier this year he kept busy producing Blade Runner 2049, and directing Alien: Covenant. Both films underwhelmed at the box office, and in the case of the latter it’s led to speculation that Scott’s ambitious franchise plans have ground to a halt.
That’s apparently not the case, according to Scott’s latest comments to EW. He confirms to them that a new Alien film will happen, but we may see a shift away from the alien Xenomorphs. Say wha!?
“We are [going to make another], we are. I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff.”
Okay, so what’s he want to turn his attention to? Artificial Intelligence, a subject that has been coursing pretty close to the surface in his Alien movies, anyway. You can’t have a malevolent android running around and not have it be an issue, right?
“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.”
As an example Scott noted Facebook’s experiment with two AIs last summer in which they started talking in their own unique language, forcing the whole thing to be shut down. He’s right, that shit was mad scary…
“They put two AIs together and they were communing. It already invented a f—ing language! And they couldn’t decipher what the language was so they had to switch them off. What was said and where’s it gone? They could have already implemented something we don’t know.”
Does anybody want to see Alien go down that path, though? I doubt it, and definitely 20th Century Fox wouldn’t want it. If the Alien: Covenant box office tells us anything it’s that only the hardcore fans are sticking around, so why do something that could potentially turn them off next?
