As Sigourney Weaver hints that Ripley might return for a new Alien sequel, we look at the conception, death and possible rebirth of Alien 5… NB: The following contains spoilers for Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection. We’ve been here before. The star of the long-running Alien franchise teases her return for a new movie, it ... Alien 5 | After nearly 30 years, might it finally happen?
As Sigourney Weaver hints that Ripley might return for a new Alien sequel, we look at the conception, death and possible rebirth of Alien 5…
NB: The following contains spoilers for Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection.
We’ve been here before. The star of the long-running Alien franchise teases her return for a new movie, it gets tantalisingly close to production, and then it’s shut down. But over the past few days, Sigourney Weaver has again suggested that her signature character, Ellen Ripley, could come back for a fifth adventure, and it doesn’t sound entirely like wishful thinking, either.
Speaking at New York Comic Con, Weaver said that she’s been in at least one meeting with 20th Century Studios (once 20th Century Fox, now owned by Disney) and that a script has been partly written. Amounting to around 50 pages – so roughly half of a typical feature screenplay – it’s by Walter Hill, a regular franchise producer whose uncredited rewrite of the original Alien did much to give it the patina of grit that made it such a standout.
Could it actually happen this time? Again, we’ve had an Alien sequel fall apart before, but there’s certainly an outside chance that Ripley could finally get a belated big screen sign-off.
If nothing else, the timing might be right…
The birth of Alien 5
Following the huge success of 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens, the franchise twisted itself into something of a narrative pretzel that later filmmakers tried to unpick. Alien 3 (1992) killed off two much-loved characters from Aliens – Newt and Hicks – then had Ripley sacrifice herself at the end. Alien Resurrection (1997) was something of a course-correction, with Ripley brought back as a human-xenomorph hybrid.
Both films were divisive among both fans and critics, and Aliens director James Cameron, in particular, was angry about what Alien 3 did to the characters he created.
“I hated what they did…. I couldn’t stand Alien 3,” Cameron told the BBC in 2003. “How they could just go in there and kill off all these great characters we introduced in Aliens, and the correlation between mother and daughter. It stunk, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to rectify all that.”
Cameron therefore began early work on a sequel that would essentially ignore what happened in Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection. It would have again starred Sigourney Weaver, and its tone would have been “similar to what we did with Aliens.” Curiously, Cameron also suggested that his sequel might have had a role for his old friend Arnold Schwarzenegger, who led Fox’s other sci-fi action horror franchise, Predator.
Ironically, it was Fox’s decision to press ahead with a crossover movie – what would become 2004’s Alien Vs Predator – that killed Alien 5. Cameron was “pretty upset” at Fox executives about the move, arguing that an Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein-type film would “kill the validity of the franchise.”
Sigourney Weaver was similarly cross about the situation. “Once they were committed to Alien Vs Predator,” she told MTV in 2009, “If you don’t respect the creature… it just becomes too hum-drum.”
Cameron instead pressed ahead with Avatar, released in 2009, and he’s been working away on that sci-fi fantasy franchise ever since.
Live, die, retreat
After the critical and financial failure of Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem in 2007, the franchise essentially retreated into the past. Ridley Scott returned to the universe he created with 2010’s Prometheus – a Lovecraftian tangent that was as interested in questions of artificial life, death and creation as it was in visceral body horror.
In 2015, however, District 9 director Neill Blomkamp began teasing his own plans for a fifth sequel – a project later dubbed Alien: Awakening. Like Cameron’s earlier concept, it would have ignored Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, and instead picked up where Aliens ended. Ripley, Newt and Hicks are still alive, and they’re again plucked from space by Weyland-Yutani.
Between movies, the corporation has been busy on its xenomorph experiments, picking up the crashed Juggernaut craft from LV-426 and generally working out how to make bio-mechanical weapons from the species’ DNA. A now older Ripley and Hicks (the latter played by a returning Michael Biehn) would have gotten wind of the company’s antics, and led a guerilla operation to stop the project in its tracks.
This, at least, is what could be gleaned from the bits and pieces of concept art that emerged from the production; other images, rendered by Geoffrey Thoorens, appeared to show Ripley wearing xenomorph armour, recalling the manga and anime Bio Booster Armor Guyver, while another image hinted that Carrie Henn might return as a grown-up Newt.
Read more: Alien | The birth and curious death of HR Giger’s Space Jockey
Blomkamp’s passion for the project won over Sigourney Weaver, with whom he worked on his 2015 sci-fi action thriller, Chappie. Weaver talked publicly about her own enthusiasm for Alien 5, and for a while, it sounded as though it was months away from going into production.
Later that year, however, Alien: Awakening hit a road block. Chappie was of a critical and financial disappointment, and Ridley Scott, it seemed, had questioned Fox’s plan to make a sequel around the same time he was directing his follow-up to Prometheus – 2017’s Alien Covenant.
“They wanted to do Alien, er, Awakening – Neill Blomkamp … I said fine,” Scott told The Independent. “I was going to be the producer. If I could have, I would have. Except I do question – why have both out there? It seems like shooting your big toe off – it doesn’t make sense. But they didn’t go forward with it, Fox, so I just kind of kept out of it.”
Rebirth
Whatever the reasons were, Alien 5 was set aside and the franchise continued mining the past for stories. Alien: Romulus, released in 2024, took place between Alien and Aliens, allowing director Fede Alvarez to lean on the design and tone of both movies – right down to a teasing glimpse of what might have been the Narcissus, the craft Ripley escaped in at the end of the 1979 movie.
This year, Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley took the franchise to the small screen with Alien: Earth – a series set just a couple of years before the events of Alien.
With Alien: Romulus doing well enough in cinemas to coax 20th Century Studios into greenlighting a sequel, and Alien: Earth being generally well received on TV, it could be argued that the series is doing perfectly well without Ellen Ripley. The prominent mention of Weyland-Yutani in director Dan Trachtenberg’s forthcoming Predator: Badlands also hints at another attempted crossover movie in the future.
There might, however, be just enough space in the schedule for an Alien sequel to sneak in. The follow-up to Alien: Romulus, which was once being fast-tracked for production this year, has now stalled. Fede Alvarez has said he isn’t directing it, meaning the studio is now on the hunt for someone who can. What once sounded like a film that would be ready for release in 2026 has now been pushed back to an unspecified date.
Alien: Earth also has a question mark hanging over it. The series finale began streaming on the 23rd September, and without spoiling things, was evidently written to tease future seasons.
Generally, producers tend to be quick to announce that a second season has been greenlit, both as an expression of confidence in the show itself and to entice viewers into sticking with the series to the end. HBO, for example, announced that a second season of Dune: Prophecy was on the way before the first run’s finale even aired.
FX and Disney, on the other hand, have been suspiciously quiet about an Alien: Earth season 2, though Noah Hawley has said we may hear a concrete announcement over the next month or so.
Sigourney Weaver hasn’t said exactly when her meeting with 20th Century Studios took place, but the fact that there was a meeting at all could suggest that the notion of a new Ripley adventure is being treated with some seriousness.
Ripley, believe it or not
As for what Weaver and Walter Hill have been working on, it doesn’t sound a million miles away from what Cameron and Blomkamp had previously planned. Ripley has been picked up by Weyland-Yutani and, presumably as part of a cover-up operation, has put the former warrant officer in a prison somewhere.
“What Walter has written seems so true to me,” Weaver said, “as very much about the society that would incarcerate someone who has tried to help mankind, but she’s a problem to them, so she’s sort of tucked away. I think it’s a very strong first 50 pages. I’m thinking about working with Walter to see what the rest of the story would be.”
It’s unclear from that brief description whether the Ripley in Hill’s screenplay is the cloned Ripley 8 version from Alien: Resurrection, or whether his script would also ignore the third and fourth sequels. Joss Whedon, who wrote Resurrection, once drafted a sequel that would have followed Ripley on the post-apocalyptic Earth briefly glimpsed in a scene cut from Jeunet’s film; Weaver nixed the idea.
This brings us to an important point about Weaver: she has a lot of clout when it comes to her character and the franchise in general; she was producer on Alien 3 and Resurrection, and had said in the 2000s that she’d only agree to star in a sequel if she liked the idea.
Walter Hill, similarly, has a stake in the franchise; he’s been listed as a producer on every movie released to date. The people with bigger sway, however, are the studio executives that decide what gets the go-ahead and what doesn’t, and Ridley Scott. Although he hasn’t ruled out making one final Alien movie (he even talked about making a sequel himself in the early 2000s), his busy slate and advancing years mean he’s more likely to produce than direct one himself.
If Hill and Weaver are happy with the story they’re working on, and the studio sees some financial mileage in it, then maybe Scott can also be coaxed into giving it the go-ahead. Weaver has long said that she regards Ripley’s story as being unfinished, and that the character needs a proper send-off.
“Even in 20 years,” Weaver told MTV in 2009, “if someone came to me and said, ‘This is the story, and it’s a really interesting story using that world’ [I’d do it]. I think it’s an amazing saga,” the 59-year-old actress reasoned. “I don’t sit around thinking, ‘Oh I want to do another Alien,’ but it does feel slightly unfinished to me. But that has a lot to do with Fox, so it wouldn’t surprise me if another generation at Fox, looking at what they have, would [make it work].”
Weaver may be in her 70s now, but she’s still busy, with roles in Cameron’s Avatar: Fire And Ash, coming this year, and Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian And Grogu, due in 2026. There’s at least a small chance, then, that Ripley’s story will be given a belated yet satisfying conclusion.
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