‘It’s possible’ that the Alien franchise godfather didn’t like Chappie, and ended his hopes of directing the fifth film in the franchise, says Neill Blomkamp.
Neill Blomkamp has been relatively quiet for a long time with regards to what happened to his mooted Alien sequel, which eventually never came to fruition. Instead, Ridley Scott, director of both the original Alien and the spin-off, Prometheus, returned to the franchise. Thus, rather than Blomkamp’s planned mainline Alien sequel, we instead got another movie in the spin-off series, Scott’s rather divisive Alien: Covenant.
However, with a new film out for the first time in six years, Blomkamp has been chatting about the process of trying and failing to get Alien 5 off the ground.
Talking to The Guardian over the weekend, Blomkamp reflected on his experience with Alien 5, stating that “it’s possible that Ridley watched Chappie and he was like, this guy can’t do Alien so let’s just go ahead and move on.”
Blomkamp also said that having the “rug pulled out from underneath” him was unpleasant, and when combined with his failure to get both a Robocop and Halo film off the ground also, is now at the point that he now probably wouldn’t consider working with somebody else’s intellectual property (IP).
The filmmaker suggests it also soured his relationship with Scott, saying “I’m not gonna work on a film for two years and have the rug pulled out from underneath me and then go hang out and have beers. It’s exactly why I don’t want to do IP based on other people’s stuff ever again.”
In the interview, which is well worth a read, Blomkamp also referenced Sigourney Weaver and the fans of the Alien franchise, saying “I also felt bad for Sigourney because she was really into what I had brought forward. I felt like [for] audiences who loved Aliens, there was an opportunity to do one more film with Sigourney in a way that may have satiated what people were looking for and what I think I was looking for. What doesn’t make sense is that I feel like it’s what the audience wanted so it’s strange because Fox would never really turn down money.”
It’s a candid admission from the filmmaker, who after seven years without directing a feature film is back with the low-budget Demonic.
Blomkamp is also currently writing a sequel to his biggest hit, the critically-lauded sci-fi drama, District 10.
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