Sigourney Weaver

In hindsight, it seems kind of odd that we had two directors competing to make movies in the same franchise. Back in 2015, director Neill Blomkamp sort of bull-rushed Hollywood by releasing concept art from the Alien 5 sequel he had been working on for 20th Century Fox. This was despite the fact that Ridley Scott had already made Prometheus  —  a direct prequel to the events of the Alien universe  —  and was working on what would later become Alien: Covenant. After months of rumors and Blomkamp’s promise to bring back a few beloved characters, the project petered out, and Scott emerged the sole proprietor of the Alien franchise.

Thanks to the wonders of CGI technology (or “movie magic”), we’ve seen several actors restored to their youthful forms on the big screen — or, in the case of Peter Cushing in last year’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, brought back from the dead (a questionable move, to say the least). Martin Scorsese is planning to digitally de-age Robert De Niro for his long-developing mob drama The Irishman, and now another iconic director is mulling the possibility.

In The Assignment, Michelle Rodriguez plays a male hitman who’s forced to undergo surgery to live as a woman. If you’ve heard about the film, it’s likely due to the controversy that’s followed the project since 2015.

Even after the entirety of Marvel’s Iron Fist, we still didn’t know when The Defenders would assemble. Thankfully, a new official Defenders teaser has arrived, hinting at an August premiere for Marvel’s street-level heroes!

Well, it’s official. Whether the world is prepared for it or not, James Cameron and co. are going to start production on Avatar 2 this fall. Yep, you read that right, the on-again-off-again sequel(s) project will finally start coming to fruition, provided international calamity doesn’t strike our shores in the coming months.

The ending of Alien — one of the scariest movies of all time — isn’t exactly happy, but at least one of the members of the Nostromo crew survives. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley lives to fight another day, and another alien, but the original ending that Ridley Scott suggested wasn’t nearly as upbeat.

When it was announced that Neill Blomkamp, director of the fantastic District 9, was thinking about helming an Alien sequel, people were cautiously optimistic. While Elysium and Chappie were far from impressive, District 9 is by far his best project, and maybe it would be good for him to get back into movies about extraterrestrial creatures. But, alas, his take on Alien is probably not to be, as the director himself says the chances of him joining the franchise are “Slim.”

Despite having seen legendary genre director Walter Hill’s latest feature at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September, I had completely forgotten that it exists until the first trailer surfaced earlier today. Perhaps this is because the film has now changed titles twice, going from the thoroughly problematic Tomboy to the still pretty problematic (Re)Assignment to the vague, slightly better The Assignment. Or perhaps this is because the movie is bad, bad, bad. Whether it’s the schadenfreude-fueled fun kind of bad or the soul-suckingly evil kind of bad, however, will vary from viewer to viewer.

We’ve still one more Marvel Netflix series to go before The Defenders hit the block, but the team is already hard at work in the newest photos. See for yourself, as Iron Fist takes on a masked criminal, and Jessica Jones goes out for a stroll in new previews of the team-up miniseries.

Despite all we know of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and their respective casts, The Defenders has kept deadly silent on Sigourney Weaver’s mysterious villain. No longer, as new photos reveal not only said villain’s nom de guerre, but also some Luke Cage crossover, and more.