Ridley Scott has said he’s taking back Alien. But could a new film pay off both Alien: Romulus and Alien: Covenant? We look at the possibilities. NB: The following contains spoilers for Alien: Covenant and Alien: Romulus. It’s over two years since the release of Alien: Romulus and almost a decade since Alien: Covenant. Both ... Alien | Can a sequel tie the events of Romulus and Covenant together?
Ridley Scott has said he’s taking back Alien. But could a new film pay off both Alien: Romulus and Alien: Covenant? We look at the possibilities.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Alien: Covenant and Alien: Romulus.
It’s over two years since the release of Alien: Romulus and almost a decade since Alien: Covenant. Both movies left things wide open for further stories; to date, neither of the planned sequels have emerged, or even seem particularly close to emerging.
But could an upcoming move finally resolve the dangling plot threads left by both?
Alien: Romulus, you may recall, was set between the events of Alien and Aliens, and introduced a younger cast of characters who had their own encounter with an acid-drooling xenomorph (or several). Directed by Fede Alvarez, it was somewhat cagily filled with easter eggs and call backs to Alien movies past, but was at its best when it focused on the chemistry between its two leads, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and synthetic human Andy (David Jonsson), who were both terrific.
Romulus ended with the pair, having narrowly survived their experiences on the titular Weyland-Yutani space station, heading to a planet called Yvaga. The damaged but functional Andy had in his possession a phial of the Z-01 mutagen – a plot detail that would likely have played a major part in the sequel.
With Alien: Romulus doing decent business in 2024, 20th Century Studios sounded its interest in fast-tracking that follow-up, with head honcho Steve Asbell saying at the time, “We’re working on a sequel idea now. We haven’t quite closed our deal with Fede, but we are going to, and he has an idea that we’re working on.”
You may be aware of what happened next. Alvarez suddenly departed the sequel project around September 2025, with the filmmaker saying that he and writing partner Rodo Sagueyez had “finished the script,” but that he was “gonna pass the torch on this one as director.”
Then came rumours that there were creative disagreements between Alvarez and Ridley Scott, an executive producer on both Romulus and the planned sequel. Alvarez, the story went, wanted to re-introduce Michael Fassbender’s rampaging android David in his sequel script – an idea Scott didn’t like, because he was protective over that character and its place in the prequel films.
At one stage, it looked as though filming was going to begin as soon as October 2025 – meaning that Alvarez bowed out weeks before production. It’s possible that sets had already begun to be built.
Since then, the Romulus sequel appears to have been in limbo. Rumours about new directors – Brian Duffield, Michael Sarnoski – have come to nothing. In recent months, Ridley Scott himself has made increasingly loud noises about having a more direct hand in whatever Alien film gets made next; “I’m rewriting the next Alien film,” he said in September. “I suddenly went back in and got involved.”
Not long after, the above-mentioned Duffield, director of No One Will Save You and Whalefall, said that, while he wasn’t making an Alien film as previously rumoured, he had done some sort of writing or consultation work on a screenplay.
“I helped on a script,” Duffield said. “They needed some help for a few weeks over Christmas and Steve Asbell at 20th asked – as I was taking a break on Whalefall over the holidays – if I would help them out a little bit. It was a very brief window. I’m not a part of it.”
Read more: Podcast | In conversation with writer-director Brian Duffield
By the sounds of things, the project is still very much alive, even if it’s unclear who will actually call the shots on it. Ridley Scott may indeed want to direct himself, but given he’s busy on Treasure Island and his long-billed Bee Gees biopic, it seems unlikely that the 88 year-old filmmaking legend will get to it anytime soon.
In all likelihood, the project will go to a filmmaker in the Alvarez or Duffield mould: younger, adept at genre filmmaking, and willing to take extensive notes from Scott.
Because Scott, let’s face it, has his own unfinished business in the universe he played a pivotal role in creating. Over 30 years after Alien, he returned to direct the prequels Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). He had every intention of creating at least one more movie, designed to connect up to the events of Alien, and continuing the story of Fassbender’s David, but the box office gods intervened; Covenant did tepid business, and that appeared to be the end of David’s story.
There’s some speculation involved here, but there’s a wonder whether Alien: Romulus was intended to lay the foundation for a stealth sequel to Covenant. Alvarez’s film contained several strong connections to Scott’s prequels, with the above-mentioned Z-01 mutagen being the same black goo first introduced in Prometheus. The third act also saw the surprise appearance of a genuinely freaky Engineer-human hybrid.
When asked about his sequel plans in 2024, Alvarez talked about the planet Rain and Andy were heading towards as Romulus’s credits rolled. Called Yvaga, it was described by the pair as lush and Earth-like – the sticking point being that synthetics like Andy wouldn’t be welcome in this green idyll. There’s an interesting detail here, though: ‘Yvaga’ means ‘paradise’ in the Guarani language.
Alvarez continued, “We tend to believe it’s probably a terrible place that they think is great and fantasise about, so we naturally started thinking about where it goes and what’s going to happen. ‘Oh, that sounds like a sequel.’”
This isn’t the first time the word ‘paradise’ has come up in the Alien franchise. For months, Alien: Covenant was going by the name Alien: Paradise Lost – a reference to the poet John Milton whose work inspired David and his devilish antics. For a long time, there was an assumption that ‘paradise’ referred to Planet 4, the world that the crew of the Covenant fatefully diverted to in the film.
There’s another possibility, though. Like Alien: Romulus, Alien: Covenant ended with a synthetic human heading to Origae-6 – an Earth-like planet that was the Covenant ship’s original destination before the crew diverted it to Planet 4. David had taken control of the Covenant, and was headed to Origae-6 with a freezer full of human embryos and xenomorph specimens. We can only guess at what unholy antics David had planned.
Again, this is speculation. But what if Yvaga and Origae-6 are the same planet? It would certainly explain how Andy and Rain would bump into David, and in storytelling terms, it could resolve two threads at once. It would give audiences a continuation of the Alien: Romulus story, while giving Scott a chance to give David’s plotline the resolution he wanted.
By the sounds of things, Duffield worked on the mystery Alien script last December, and so it’s anyone’s guess when the film will start shooting or who will direct it. For now, though, it does sound as though the project is still very much alive; as Duffield said recently, “I know what they’re doing and it’s really neat.”
Ridley Scott has said in interviews that the film will see David set up “a brave new world for himself.” At present, we don’t know whether Rain and Andy will figure in the story now that Scott’s intervened; it’s possible that they’ve been jettisoned, much like other horrors in the Alien franchise have been in the past.
For now, though, there’s at least the possibility that the fates of Rain, Andy, David and perhaps the xenomorph will all intertwine – creating some sort of cohesion in a film franchise currently filled with loose ends.
