Ridley Scott Confirms Plans For A Third Alien Prequel With Michael Fassbender's David

With The Dog Stars hitting cinemas this week, Sir Ridley Scott is clearly back in his sci-fi bag after years spent mostly on historical epics — Napoleon, Gladiator II, The Last Duel and, er, House Of Gucci. So the question of whether he would ever return to arguably his most famous piece of speculative fiction, Alien, has reared its head again. Per a new interview with The LA Times, the answer is yes — and he already has big plans in mind.

In a wide-ranging conversation that also revealed his Hugh Jackman-starring Treasure Island shoots in November, plus a Bee Gees biopic and WWI thriller Covenant With Death on the horizon, Scott confirmed that a long-awaited third Alien prequel — following 2012's Prometheus and 2017's Alien: Covenant — is in the works.

The plan is to bring Michael Fassbender back as rogue AI android David, in a film that would see the soft-spoken but deeply sinister synthetic creating "a brave new world for himself." Scott, whose aversion to AI is well documented both in his movies and his public statements, is keen to push the idea of malfunctioning artificial intelligence further in a potential capper to the David trilogy. "AIs can go off," Scott told The LA Times. "And if they do, it's like a bomb."

For now, Scott's Alien plans remain exactly that — plans. There is no timeline and no word on who else might be involved. But given Alien: Covenant ended with David in control of 2,000 sleeping colonists and a couple of facehugger embryos, there is no shortage of directions for bridging the gap between the prequels and the original film.

Between this, Alien: Earth Season 2 and an Alien: Romulus sequel still on the way, there has never been a better time to be a xenomorph fan.