About two months, District 9 director Neill Blomkamp teased the world via his personal Instagram account with some badass concept art suggesting that he was developing a brand new movie in the Alien franchise that would bring back original series star Sigourney Weaver. There has been plenty of questioning in the weeks since regarding whether or not this project would actually ever be happening, but today we have an actual answer - and it's yes!
This confirmation came this afternoon, once again from Blomkamp's Instagram feed. Rather than showing off some more new concept art, however, the filmmaker instead posted some xenomorph-related art from H.R. Giger, and paired it with a simple caption:
Our first hint that this new Alien project was happening actually came last week while Neill Blomkamp was doing a press junket in New York for his latest film, Chappie. At the time, the filmmaker told a reporter that the ball was actually in his court regarding a new Alien movie, and said that all he needed to do was call the folks at 20th Century Fox and say "Yes" to secure a green light for his idea. It appears that in the past few days he did exactly that.
If all goes according to plan, the new Alien film will be the fifth movie that Blompkamp has made. Mentioned above, he made his directorial debut in 2009 with the spectacular sci-fi film District 9, and he followed it up in 2013 with the Matt Damon-starring action flick Elysium. Chappie, which features Sigourney Weaver in its cast alongside District 9's Sharlto Copley and Hugh Jackman, will be in theaters on March 6th.
To get an idea of what to expect from the new Alien film, one only needs to look at Neill Blomkamp's Instagram page, as it is filled with some awesome looking art that gets us very excited for what he has in store. For example, there's this image - which appears to be a hybrid of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley and a xenomorph:
And here's a rather epic looking ship that we can probably expect to see on the big screen in the next few years.
This is pretty big and awesome news, but it also comes with a lot of questions. What will this movie be called? How will it relate to everything we've seen in the entirety of the Alien franchise, including possibly Alien vs. Predator? What does this mean for the plans for Ridley Scott's Prometheus 2 plans? At this point, there's not a ton to go on.
