With his new horror movie Demonic now available through VOD platforms, it was inevitable that Neill Blomkamp‘s latest trip around the interview circuit would yield some fresh insights into a movie he never actually ended up making, that being his sequel to James Cameron’s Aliens that would’ve brought back Sigourney Weaver as franchise heroine Ellen Ripley.
What we know of Blomkamp’s vision is that it would’ve seen Weaver return as Ellen Ripley alongside Michael Biehn as Corporal Hicks, and various pieces of concept art have surfaced over the years to give us some idea of what Blomkamp had been planning. The plan was to retcon all the films in the franchise beyond Aliens, but of course 20th Century Fox ultimately decided to go forward with Ridley Scott‘s prequel Alien: Covenant instead.
In a new interview with The Guardian, Blomkamp opens up a bit about the Aliens sequel that never was, suggesting that Chappie may have had something to do with it being killed off.
“It’s possible that Ridley [Scott] watched Chappie and he was like, this guy can’t do Alien so let’s just go ahead and move on,” Blomkamp suggests. As The Guardian notes, Chappie was released back in 2015, just a handful of months before the Aliens sequel was scrapped.
Blomkamp continues in the new interview with The Guardian, “I also felt bad for Sigourney [Weaver] 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.”
Blomkamp also reaffirms during the chat that his Aliens sequel is very much dead in the water, and that he’s likely to stay away from established IP like the Alien franchise going forward.
“It’s exactly why I don’t want to do IP based on other people’s stuff ever again,” Blomkamp says. “I’m sure they will make many films with that piece of IP, it just doesn’t include me.”
On that note, you’ll find Blomkamp’s Demonic on all the major streaming services right now.
Early concept art for Blomkamp’s ‘Aliens’ sequel