Alien: Romulus | Fede Alvarez says he’s taking his sequel “into uncharted waters”

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Director Fede Alvarez enjoyed success with Alien: Romulus, but says his planned sequel will show us “things you’ve never seen before.”


It’s fair to say that most people who went to see last year’s Alien: Romulus had a good time. The film’s audience score stands at a generally favourable 70 on Metacritic and the lure of a new Alien movie from a filmmaker fresh to the franchise drew in plenty of people. The film earned $350m at the box office and did so from a production budget of $80m, a smaller price tag than either of the Ridley Scott prequel films that preceded it.

This meant that the film had made a healthy profit for 20th Century Studios (and its owner Disney) by the time its theatrical run had ended, and as a result, Alvarez is now working on a sequel.

According to an Empire interview with Alvarez, it sounds as though he plans to address a key criticism of Alien: Romulus – that it was too in thrall to its predecessors.

It’s something that our own Ryan Lambie talked about in his review of the film and he certainly wasn’t alone. Alien: Romulus wore its admiration for the previous Alien films proudly on its sleeve, and was perhaps a little too enthusiastic in making that clear, sometimes to the point of taking you out of the story.

Read more: Alien: Romulus | As the sequel is confirmed, a look at where it could go next

While chatting about his plans for the sequel, Alvarez was quick to point out that this time around, he wants to take the first film’s surviving characters and use them to show us things we haven’t seen before in an Alien film, stating, “Rodo [Sayagues, co-writer] and I are working on that right now. We’re excited about where it can go. We’ve almost checked all of the boxes of things that I want to see [in Romulus], and brought back a lot of the things I hadn’t seen in a while. Wherever we go now, we can go into uncharted waters.”

Alvarez also adds that they’ll only press ahead with another film if they come up with the right idea, and it sounds like it really does need to be something novel, with the director adding, “I think it’ll be so exciting to go with characters you know from this movie, to a place in the Alien franchise that we’ve never been before, and to discover things that you’ve never seen before.”

It could be a while before the sequel moves forward, but while Alvarez waits for inspiration to strike, there’s always the possibility of another Alien Vs. Predator movie, we suppose.

We’ll bring you more on an Alien: Romulus sequel as we hear it.

Read more: Fede Alvarez interview | Practical effects, Hollywood apathy, and making divisive sci-fi horror

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