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Neill Blomkamp posted some more concept images from his canceled Alien movie

Neill Blomkamp posted some more concept images from his canceled Alien movie

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A film that never was

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Image: Neill Blomkamp

A couple of years ago, District 9 director Neill Blomkamp posted a number of images to his Instagram feed of an Alien film that he had been secretly working on. The images sparked a deal with 20th Century Fox to develop the film, but after Ridley Scott began work on his Prometheus sequel, Alien: Covenant, Blomkamp told The Verge that he thought that the film was “totally dead.”

In a Tweet, Blomkamp noted that he had recently been going through some of the artwork that he had put together for his Aliens sequel, and posted a couple of select images online. It seems as though this art largely came after those initial images he posted.

His posts revealed images of a some Weyland-Yutani personnel, a USCM drop ship, and a Xenomorph alien lurking in an air vent. Hopefully, he’ll release some more down the road.

Blomkamp’s film reportedly would have ignored David Finchers ALIEN³ and rebooted the franchise after James Cameron’s Aliens. That project isn’t likely to be made, with both Blomkamp and Scott have said that the project is dead. It’s a shame, because Blomkamp has demonstrated a particular affinity with sci-fi horror that would play well in the universe. In the meantime, we can hope that we’ll see one of his Oats projects turned into a longer feature film. His next feature film is an adaptation of Tom Sweterlitsch’s upcoming novel The Gone World.

But while Alien: Covenant returned to the familiar horror that defined the franchise, it underperformed at the box office, earning far less than its predecessor, 2012’s flawed Prometheus. The studio was reportedly “reassessing” the two sequels that Scott had planned for the series, and there’s been wild (and unconfirmed) speculation that the films have been put on ice. With Disney’s recent acquisition of 20th Century Fox, it’s likely that the franchise will continue in some form, even if they decide to rework the Alien: Covenant sequels, or abandon them altogether.