How Many More Alien Movies Ridley Scott Says He'll Make

Now the that Ridley Scott’s upcoming Prometheus sequel appears to have a set-in-stone name (though that could very well change, again), Alien: Covenant, we’re left to wonder how long it will be until the action in this thread links up with his 1979 classic, Alien. Sir Ridley has talked about making multiple movies and now we know that Covenant is the first of three movies that will lead the franchise back to Alien.

Scott is in Australia beginning the pre-production process on Covenant. When The Hollywood Reporter caught up with him to talk about the project, The Martian director said:

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.

With these three new films, Scott plans to continue the progression of the Alienorigin stories he set up in the last film. The basic questions that he plans to answer deal with the H.R. Giger-designed Xenomorph, and revolve around where the horrifying beast came from, who would go out of their way to create such a creature, and why the hell would you want to do that in the first place? We also may learn the origins of the Space Jockey from Alien.

He also intends to continue the larger thematic ideas from the first Prometheus film, which is, at its core, an origin story of humanity. It follows a search for our own creators, though as we saw in the first movie, what we eventually find might not be exactly what we hoped for. Especially as it appears that the Engineers Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) found on the distant moon of LV-223, the ones who created us from scratch, ultimately planned to wipe us out. Perhaps we’ll find out why in the upcoming movies.

There aren’t a ton of plot details available for Alien: Covenant just yet, but we know that, like Prometheus, the title comes from a spacecraft that is destined to have an ill-fated journey. The crew of the colony ship Covenant comes across a planet on the far side of the galaxy that they initially think is a remote, uncharted paradise. That is, apparently, not entirely the case, as this world holds hidden dangers, and the only occupant is the android David (Michael Fassbender), who we last saw blasting off from LV-223 with Elizabeth Shaw at the end of the previous film. We know that he was generally up to no good, so we’re very curious to see what he has up his synthetic sleeves this time.

Alien: Covenant is scheduled to shoot for 16 weeks at Fox’s studios in Sydney, Australia, and is slated for release on October 6, 2017.