Sigourney Weaver: Alien 5 Was Killed by ‘Possessive’ Ridley Scott

Picture this: a monster hovers over a defenseless child. It has every ability to tear the child apart, to infect the child, and turn it into something new. Something hideous. But then, just before the monster lunges, the child’s caretaker arrives and commands, “Get away from her, you bitch!”

Okay, that’s probably not how it went down when Ridley Scott put a stop to Neill Blomkamp‘s proposed Alien sequel. But it’s not too different, at least the way Sigourney Weaver told it to attendees at an Alien panel at a recent screening of the 1979 original (via AVP Galaxy). “It was a wonderful script, and unfortunately, it was at that point I think that Ridley Scott decided to be very possessive about the series and really drilled down on his prequels,” Weaver explained, when asked about the ill-fated film. “And so I think it was a disaster for that project.”

Blomkamp broke out in the genre movie scene with his 2009 film District 9, which used alien outsiders as a metaphor for the lingering effects of South African apartheid. Since then, Blomkamp’s work has had a more mixed reception, as demonstrated by the Rotten Tomatoes scores for 2013’s Elysium and the 2023 video game adaptation Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story.

Yet, Weaver remained a fan. “Like many of us, I was a big admirer of Neill,” she related to attendees. “His movie was so striking, and I worked with him on a movie called [Chappie]. And I loved working with Neill, and he had this idea of bringing Ripley and Newt back.”

Yes, Blomkamp’s film would have predicted the modern trend of ignoring all the less-loved sequels and taking place in its own timeline. This film would have picked up some time after Aliens, ignoring the fate of Newt and Hicks in Alien 3, and would have set Ripley to face off with another Alien Queen.

Of course the actual fifth Alien movie ended up being Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s exploration of the “space jockey” (now renamed “engineers”) from the original film. The xenomorph, however, would not appear again in earnest until Scott’s Alien: Covenant, which is a more traditional prequel with the titular monster on a rampage on a spaceship. It also featured much of the same philosophical and religious wondering that marked Prometheus, making it something of a mixed bag for fans.

Weaver also discussed a different fifth Alien film, one written by Walter Hill. In addition to being a producer who helped shepherd the original Alien from a gonzo script by Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon into the classic today, Hill is an accomplished filmmaker in his own right, albeit better known for gritty crime flicks like The Warriors and 48 Hrs.

“Walter Hill has written about 50 pages. Maybe, by now, he’s written more about where Ripley might be now,” Weaver revealed. “And although I’ve never particularly wanted to go back to the series, there’s something about her experience being sidelined now, probably by this society, by this company, by this world and being probably around 200 years old, but still [being] Ripley and you know, presumably these problems [are] still out there.”

Weaver remains uncertain about the status of Hill’s current script, noting that it would be “a very different kind of story” than the original Alien. But it sounds like she’s interested in hearing what Hill has in mind—provided that Scott doesn’t tell him to get away too.