Memo to Ridley Scott: no one needs more Alien: Covenant movies – get the franchise back to stalk’n’slash

News that Scott is working on a follow-up to his maligned 2017 film leaves me worried the franchise has run out of shocks If any science-fiction saga looked beyond recovery, it was the Alien franchise.

For the 38 years that followed James Cameron’s Aliens, film-makers contrived to find every imaginable way of not making a good Alien film.

They tried killing everyone the audience cared about before the opening credits, marooning Sigourney Weaver on a planet populated entirely by bald British character actors , cloning Ripley , pitting xenomorphs against Predators , and sending scientists across the universe to ask an enormous, hairless space bodybuilder why he made them .

They even ponied up the thick end of $100m for a film in which Michael Fassbender teaches himself to play the flute .

And then in 2024, we got Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus , in which actual xenomorphs chase actual human beings down actual corridors for the clearly defined purposes of either killing them or putting smaller xenomorphs inside them.

Better still, a year later we got Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth , which reminded us that giant, murderous space insects are in fact less awful than tech trillionaires.

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