Prometheus

“Wait, but what happened to Dr. Elizabeth Shaw?” That’s been one of our biggest questions in the months leading up to the release of Alien: Covenant, which introduces us to a new crew and inches ever closer to the events in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic. In honor of Alien Day, 20th Century Fox has released a new prologue that helps bridge the gap between Prometheus and Covenant…and reveals the fate of Noomi Rapace’s Dr. Shaw.

In space… no one can hear your crackly John Denver records. The timeless country standard “Take Me Home, Country Road” provides an eerie soundtrack for the latest peek at Ridley Scott’s long-time-coming Alien prequel Covenant. Over some rather breathtaking shots of a hostile, foreign world (no offense, New Zealand), we hear the familiar ode to the beauty of the American South, contrasting the harsh new climate with mental pictures of the gentle, rolling hills of West Virginia. Things get progressively creepier as the Xenomorph descends on our motley crew of intergalactic colonists, scaling their spacecraft and trying to get at the humans inside like they’re the filling of a delicious meaty empanada.

There’s nothing better than when an iconic filmmaker accidentally lets new juicy details slip about the future of a franchise. For a while now we’ve been getting bits and pieces teasing the new Alien: Covenant, the (supposed) sequel to Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. But now a new interview with the filmmaker questions that Alien timeline, and reveals the title of the next movie in the franchise.

Looking back, I’m not really sure there was ever a winning proposition for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. The stakes were high enough when we only thought that Prometheus was a big-budget science-fiction movie for one of the genre’s great pioneers; once we learned that Prometheus would also serve as a prequel of sorts to the Alien universe, the film never stood a chance. Of course, Prometheus did not do itself any favors by awkwardly tying together Alien mythology with Interstellar-esque futurism, but maybe in a few years we’ll look back on the film with a little more fondness.

A couple of months ago Ridley Scott gave a curious quote to a German website about the future of the Prometheus / Alien franchise. After being translated to German and back to English, the quote was a bit confusing, but basically indicated that Scott had plans for at least two Prometheus sequels. Prone as he sometimes is to excess and abrupt changes of mind, Scott has revealed that the upcoming Alien: Covenant is actually the first in a new trilogy that will eventually tie Prometheus to the original Alien film.

Just the other day, director Ridley Scott slipped (?) and revealed the new title for his upcoming Prometheus sequel would be Alien: Covenant. This was news to many, considering Scott previously slipped and revealed the title was Alien: Paradise Lost...

Ridley Scott has been threatening us with Prometheus 2 ever since the first film left audiences baffled back in 2012. Now, riding high on rave reviews for The Martian, the legendary (and legendarily hit-and-miss) filmmaker has started talking about not just Prometheus 2, but Prometheus 3. And Prometheus 4. But don’t expect the next movie to have that title. In a new interview, Scott has revealed the follow-up to Prometheus will bear a title that directly connects it to the franchise that bore it.

The current state of the Alien franchise is a little confusing, to say the least. In one corner, you have Ridley Scott planning to make a sequel to his prequel, Prometheus. In the other corner, you have Neill Blomkamp, still plugging away at Alien 5, which may or may not ignore the third and fourth entries in the original series. In fact, the sheer amount of Alien stuff in the works seems to have clogged up the pipes. If a new report is to be believed, Blomkamp’s film is being put on the back burner until Scott can make Prometheus 2 a reality.

One Alien fan with a lot of time on his hands decided that Ridley Scott’s Prometheus needed improvement — so that’s just what he did. Desaturating both Alien and Prometheus to black and white, film student Job Willins edited the two films into one better version of Prometheus, which may address some of the complaints many fans had with Scott’s semi-prequel.

When viewers head to the theater to watch Jurassic World this weekend, they’ll find a movie that transports them, almost literally, back to the first Jurassic Park. Colin Trevorrow’s new film is a sequel to Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original — and only that film. In an interview with ScreenCrush, when Trevorrow was asked about whether his movie pretended The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III never happened, Trevorrow explained, “Our film is just more of a direct sequel to the original Jurassic Park.” He made a similar comment to Yahoo! Movies; he told them the earlier sequels “aren’t being written out of continuity so much as placed to the side, as they both unfolded on a different island.”