‘Alien 5’ Concept Art Reveals More of Neill Blomkamp’s Scrapped Sequel to ‘Aliens’

For a couple of years in the mid-2010s, there was talk about whether or not District 9 director Neill Blomkamp would get a chance to make Alien 5, a sequel (of sorts) in the beloved sci-fi/horror franchise which would have been set in the aftermath of James Cameron’s 1986 movie Aliens. The window for that opportunity seems to have definitively closed, but some previously unseen concept art has surfaced, giving fans another glimpse into the “what-if” scenario in which the filmmaker could have recruited star Sigourney Weaver back into the fold to play Ellen Ripley one more time. Take a look below.

We’ve seen lots of concept art for this scrapped Alien 5 movie over the years, but AVP Galaxy (via Bloody-Disgusting) unearthed some more today that we’d never seen before. The site found that concept artist Geoffroy Thoorens had recently re-uploaded several pieces from the development of this movie that we’d seen already to his personal website, but there were a couple of unfamiliar pieces thrown into this batch of artwork as well. Here is a close look at those two pieces.

That top photo would prove somewhat prophetic, since even though Sigourney Weaver has not yet returned to the world of Alien, she’s jumped into the deep end of James Cameron’s weird Avatar sequel pool and was photographed last floating through a barrage of ping pong balls last fall. I’m honestly not sure what we’re looking at in that second photo: previous concept art pinpoints this location as “Weyland” and this one is specifically captured “Fire Area,” but I don’t know exactly what that means and I can’t quite wrap my head around what is happening here. A Xenomorph is looking on as…a giant Xenomorph…rips apart…a ship? Another type of alien? It’s hard to say.

In any case, here’s a brief recap of the timeline of Blomkamp’s Alien sequel. In 2015, word came out that Blomkamp had signed a deal to make a new Alien movie that was not a follow-up to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, but would instead take place after the events of Aliens. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley was a lead character, as were Michael Biehn’s Corporal Dwayne Hicks and a grown-up version of Newt, the little girl Ripley saves in Aliens. But a few months later, rumors swirled that Scott was developing a sequel to Prometheus, and that 20th Century Fox was giving Scott priority over Blomkamp’s proposed project. That October, Blomkamp’s project was put on hold indefinitely while Scott worked on what would become Alien: Covenant, and in 2017, Blomkamp finally confirmed that his Alien 5 movie was dead.

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