For some reason, Ridley Scott is determined to take ownership of the franchise he started with 1979's ALIEN, despite the fact that he has little to no interest in doing more with the xenomorph alien. Last month, Scott gave an interview in which he said that he means to "replace" the xenomorph with something else because "the beast has almost run out". That's an intention he has repeated in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Scott's ALIEN prequel PROMETHEUS set the stage for the xenomorph to come into the scene with this year's ALIEN: COVENANT. Scott is now developing a third chapter in this trilogy series and
I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff. People say, ‘You need more alien, you need more face pulling, need more chest bursting,’ so I put a lot of that in COVENANT and it fitted nicely. But I think if you go again you need to start finding another solution that’s more interesting. I think AI is becoming much more dangerous and therefore more interesting."
Scott explains his fear of AI by referencing an experiment that was conducted by Facebook:
They put two AIs together and they were communing. It already invented a f—ing language! And they couldn’t decipher what the language was so they had to switch them off. What was said and where’s it gone? They could have already implemented something we don’t know."
Scott's fear of AI takes the form of the android David, played by Michael Fassbender, in PROMETHEUS and ALIEN: COVENANT. COVENANT ended with a cliffhanger involving that character, and Scott has said that the next film will be about
the world that the AI might create as a leader if he finds himself onto a new planet."
Hopefully that will complete the AI story and Scott will be satisfied enough to move on from the ALIEN franchise again so other directors who are interested in working with the xenomorph (like Neill Blomkamp, for example) can be brought in.
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