When Disney acquired the entire 20th Century Fox library, many fans of the studio’s R-rated franchises wondered what the future held. After all, the thought of the family-friendly Mouse House tackling properties like Alien, Predator or Die Hard would inevitably be greeted with skepticism, although rebranding as 20th Century Studios should alleviate some of those concerns given that the film division will have its own set of personnel and operate independently of Walt Disney Studios.
There’s already an Alien TV series in the works for Hulu with Ridley Scott and Noah Hawley set to executive produce, while 10 Cloverfield Lane‘s Dan Trachtenberg is hard at work on his period-set Predator reboot. Last year, Scott revealed that another feature-length outing for the Xenomorphs was in development as well, but a new report offers that his idea has been abandoned in favor of wiping the slate clean.
As per the latest intel, Disney and 20th Century Studios are now crafting an all-new Alien story that won’t connect to any of the previous installments in the franchise, which means Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is out of the picture, despite what insider Daniel Richtman has been claiming over the last little while. No offense to the star or the sci-fi icon she played, but this makes a certain degree of sense, because you can’t realistically build a multi-film series around a 71 year-old actress no matter how important nostalgia and legacy sequels have become in modern Hollywood.
Instead, the new Alien is said to revolve around a fresh batch of colonists who stumble upon an uninhabited planet, or so they thought. Of course, there are Facehuggers lurking around, with the twist being that a scientist incubates one of them in a tank to grow their own homemade extraterrestrial, which becomes attached to and protective of its creator. It’s an interesting twist, but we’ll just have to wait and see how quickly or slowly the project ends up moving forward.
