Neill Blomkamp will follow the success of Gran Turismo with Alpha, starring Aaron Paul as an FBI agent hunting a prison inmate turned into an apex predator.
Neill Blomkamp hasn’t had a lot of luck with getting projects to the screen in the last decade. Plenty of ink has been spilled about his aborted take on Alien 5, but there’s also RoboCop Returns, the Halo film (although that project’s demise led directly to District 9) and, dare we say it, District 10.
The last project on that list may yet happen, some day. Blomkamp began talking about a sequel to his beloved science fiction movie back in 2021, with star Sharlto Copley adding a couple of years ago that it was still at least a year away from shooting. We’re now two years on and there’s still no sign of the film coming together.
Part of the problem is that ever since he made his name with District 9, Blomkamp’s films – rightly or wrongly – have been perceived as offering ever diminishing returns.
Despite having plenty of admirers, movies such as Elysium, Chappie and Demonic came and went without giving the filmmaker that second universally-praised critical hit which convinces studios to trust a filmmaker’s instinct with lots and lots of dollars.
However, Blomkamp’s last film was Gran Turismo, a big splashy studio picture for Sony that picked up good audience scores and grossed reasonably well. Well enough at least, for the studio to apparently give Blomkamp another project to helm in the form of Alpha.
According to Daniel Richtman (via World Of Reel), the story focuses on ‘a government approved experiment on a death row inmate gone awry. They’ve turned him into apex predator and Paul’s FBI agent has been assigned to track him down.’ It sounds like the sort of material that Blomkamp could really do well with, especially if it plays into that overlap between sci-fi, action and horror which he constructed so well in District 9.
Should he prove himself as a reliable money-spinner for the studio yet again with Alpha, could that finally unlock District 10 for Blomkamp? Time will tell but we’ll bring you more on Alpha as we hear it.
