When Ridley Scott announced his return to science-fiction with the mammoth production Prometheus (2012), rumors immediately began to eddy: Would it be a prequel to Alien? Scott wouldn’t say, though the answer was obviously, “Yes, it is a prequel.” Now, following the announcement that his Prometheus sequel will actually be another Alien prequel called Alien: Covenant, Scott has ditched the enigmatic ambiguities of his Prometheus marketing and is playing this one straight: he will follow up Alien: Covenant with two more Prometheus sequels, finally tying it all in to his 1979 opus Alien.
“It’s a very complex story,” he said of the new film at a press conference in Sydney. “It’s an evolution of what I first did with Prometheus 1.” It will chronicle the plight of a crew of the colony ship Covenant, who discover a Stygian non-paradise, the sole inhabitant of which is the robotic David (Michael Fassbender), apparently the only survivor from the ill-fated Prometheus. Scott went on:
“Prometheus 1 was borne out of my frustration that on Alien 1 in 1979 — I only did one as I don’t normally do sequels. I was amazed that in the three that followed that no-one asked the question, ‘Why the Alien? Who made it and why?’ Very basic questions. So I came up with the notion of Prometheus 1, which starts to indicate who might have made it and where it came from … So I’m now going to the next one, which is the next evolution directly connected with the first one, which was this Shaw, when he replaced Michael Fassbender in two pieces and we’ll kind of pick it up there and it will evolve. When that’s finished there’ll be another one and then another one which will gradually drive into the back entrance of the film in 1979.”
The reason why Scott’s long-standing aversion to sequels has apparently dissipated recently? Star Wars, obviously: “Star Wars will be a juggernaut. Why do you think I’m doing sequels?”
