It would have reunited Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn for one last bug hunt. Ryan Lambie charts the ill-fated journey of Alien 5.
Concept are for Alien 5 by Geoffroy Thoorens
Warning: spoilers for the Alien saga lie ahead.
We’ve had spin-offs and prequels, and even continuations in books, comics and video games, yet the cinematic Alien story officially ended in 1997. The fourth movie in the series, Alien Resurrection, left the sci-fi saga tantalisingly open: series heroine Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) had survived yet another encounter with the dreaded xenomorphs – plus a few mutant variants – and was about to return to her home planet, Earth.
Except, in reality, Ripley wasn’t really Ripley. The real Ripley had died at the end of Alien 3, and this incarnation was actually Ripley 8, the latest in a series of experimental clones with superhuman strength and acid for blood.
ArrayIf that sounds convoluted, then it gives an idea of Weaver’s on-again, off-again relationship with the series that had made her a star. Weaver had insisted her character be killed off in 1992’s Alien 3, since she’d had enough of playing Lieutenant Ripley. A few years later, Weaver had changed her mind and had signed up for a sequel, and so its writer, Buffy The Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, had to come up with a means of bringing her character back.
Weaver’s ambivalence is worth bringing up because, at least in 1997, 20th Century Fox seemed keen to make a fifth Alien movie. “All I can say is that the end of Alien Resurrection points you toward the locale of Alien 5,” Fox boss Tom Rothman said at the time. “We firmly expect do another one; Joss Whedon will write it, and we expect to have Sigourney and Winona [Ryder] if they’re up for it.”
“There’s a big story to tell in another sequel,” Whedon added around the same time. “The fourth film is really a prologue to a movie set on Earth. Imagine all the things that can happen…”
No go
The problem was, Weaver didn’t particularly want to do a fifth Alien movie, at least as Whedon envisoned it. “I didn’t want to go to Earth,” she said more than once in later interviews. “I thought Earth was boring.”
So-so financial returns and mixed reviews for Resurrection also muddied the waters, and despite interest from directors Ridley Scott and James Cameron, the fifth film was set aside in favour of the Alien Vs Predator 2004 spin-off and its 2007 sequel, Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem.
More than a decade passed, and with Ridley Scott taking the Alien franchise off in a very different direction with his 2012 prequel, Prometheus, it seemed as though the window for an Alien sequel – at least one starring Sigourney Weaver – was beginning to close.
All of that changed around 2014, on the set of a spikily off-kilter sci-fi movie called Chappie. Its director was Neill Blomkamp, the South African filmmaker whose career had shot into the stratosphere when his debut feature, District 9, became a rare genre film to garner an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Sigourney Weaver was one of Chappie’s stars – she played the cold-hearted corporate boss, Michelle Bradley – and it was during an on-set conversation that the topic of a fifth Alien movie came up again.
Blomkamp was a huge fan of the original Alien, and so he began professing his love for the film to Weaver. In fact, Blomkamp even had an idea for an Alien movie – one that would take place in the same ‘universe’ as James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens – but didn’t feature Ripley. Blomkamp had, not unreasonably, assumed Weaver wouldn’t be interested in starring in yet another Alien flick.
Turnaround
To Blomkamp’s surprise, Weaver not only liked his Alien 5 concept, but wanted to appear in it – she didn’t like where her character had ended up in Alien Resurrection, she’d said, but was enthusiastic about the idea of revisiting Ripley after the events of Aliens. Spurred on, Blomkamp began reworking his ideas to include Weaver’s character. “Four months later, I got this script that was so amazing,” Weaver later enthused during a San Diego Comic-Con panel. “It gives fans everything they’re looking for.”
Naturally, all of this occurred well away from the movie-going public. The first time ordinary mortals learned of Blomkamp’s Alien 5 was on the 1st January, 2015, when the director published some concept artwork on his personal Instagram account. It depicted a now much older Ellen Ripley and fellow Aliens survivor Corporal Dwayne Hicks (Michael Biehn); “Was working on this,” Blomkamp’s post read. “Don’t think I am anymore. Love it, though.”
There were other pieces art, too: the familiar alien spacecraft, once dubbed the Juggernaut, seemingly captured by the evil Weyland Yutani corporation; an image of Ripley wearing what appeared to be a suit of bio-mechanical armour. For fans of the Alien franchise, this was catnip: although Blomkamp offered no explanation or backstory behind the concept art, it was easy to fill in the blanks. Michael Biehn’s character was killed off in Alien 3’s opening credits, yet here he was, visibly older, and still wearing the acid scars he got in Aliens.
The implication was obvious: Blomkamp’s film would ignore Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection, and pick things up after James Cameron’s 1986 sequel. Weyland Yutani had finally got its hands on the xenomorph, and had begun seeking out ways to tame the beast and turn it into some kind of bio-weapon (admittedly, this isn’t unlike the events of Alien Resurrection). Best of all, the film would give Weaver and Biehn a second chance to reprise their roles, and – if an image of Ripley with a bomb strapped to her waist was anything to go by – have their characters exact their revenge on the corporation that almost killed them on the planetoid LV-426.
Ignition
If this was Blomkamp’s attempt to drum up fan support for his Alien 5 project, and convince Fox to back it, then the gambit worked: by February 2015, the project had been given the official greenlight, with Ridley Scott billed as producer. “It’s officially my next film,” Blomkamp announced on Instagram in 2015. With Alien 5 in pre-production, word of its shooting title soon broke: Red Harvest, perhaps a play on Blue Harvest, the shooting title of Return Of The Jedi.
Away from public view, Studio ADI, the effects company that had worked on Resurrection and the AvP spin-offs, was in the process of realising some of Blomkamp’s ideas – the firm built a four-armed xenomorph, akin to the one seen in the 1979 film, as well as some acid-burn make-up effects tests for Michael Biehn.
In April 2016, Blomkamp again teased his project with yet more concept art revealing the return of Newt, the little girl who survived the events of Aliens. Another character killed at the start of Alien 3, Newt was set to appear in Blomkamp’s sequel as a somewhat stern-looking 20-something-year-old.
There were, however, dark clouds gathering around the project. Ridley Scott was already busy working on his sequel to Prometheus – eventually released in 2017 as Alien: Covenant – and word began to get around that Alien 5 was being put on hold. “They’re putting the brakes on,” Michael Biehn said in an interview around the time – the thinking being, he said, that having a sequel to Aliens around at the same time as a prequel series might confuse cinemagoers.
Scott himself bore this out in press junket interviews for Alien: Covenant, where he also blurted out what may have been Alien 5’s official title at that point – Alien: Awakening.
“They wanted to do Alien: Awakening… Neill Blomkamp”, Scott told IGN. “I said fine. I was going to be the producer. If I could have, I would have. Except I do question: why have both [Blomkamp’s Alien and Scott’s Alien] out there? It seems like shooting your big toe off – it doesn’t make sense. But they didn’t go forward with it, Fox, so I just kind of kept out of it.”
Curiously, Scott also suggested around the same time that there “was no script” for Alien 5, but rather a 10-page treatment. This rather contradicted Sigourney Weaver’s assertion that the script was finished and “amazing”.
Deserted
What exactly happened behind the scenes to prompt Fox to abandon Alien 5 – whether it was hastened by Scott, or some other executive at the studio – we can only speculate. Whatever the reasoning, Blomkamp’s sequel was effectively dead by the summer of 2017; Blomkamp went off to pursue other projects (among them an aborted RoboCop project for MGM), while Weaver was committed to working on James Cameron’s Avatar sequels.
“It’s sad,” Blomkamp told The Verge that year. “I spent a long time working on that, and I feel like it was really pretty awesome. But politically, the way it’s gone now, and the way that it all is – it’s just not going to live.”
Ultimately, all that survives of Alien 5 – at least publicly – is a collection of evocative concept art. Would the movie have given Ripley one final, truly great adventure, or would it have floundered like the two previous sequels? Will its script remain in obscurity forever, or will it emerge as a graphic novel, like William Gibson’s unfilmed Alien 3 screenplay? For now, we can only look at all that imagery Blomkamp posted so enthusiastically, and think about what might have been.
