Whenever there’s not much information but a lot of interest in an upcoming movie, the Internet is always willing to fill the void with rumour and supposition, and there’s been a lot of that surrounding Ridley Scott’s planned Alien prequel. Will it be one movie or two (it will be two)? Will it feature Ripley? Has Fox balked at the costs and called it off? Has filming been delayed by a year?
While all these things have been raised at one time or another, there’s been precious little official info to calm things down. Now the speculation continues with a report from Vulture, which says that despite reports saying the films has been pushed back a year, Fox is still keen and that it’ll go into production next March.
The speculation about a delay apparently stemmed from Scott and co. thinking about trying to get Leo DiCaprio into the two-part prequel. However with Leo’s schedule full, he couldn’t have started filming until late next year at the earliest. He’s no longer involved, so the March start date is back on.
The other main news is that the film is being called Paradise – not Alien: Paradise, just Paradise. That seems to be a reference the idea that the film will be partially about terraforming and creating beautiful, habitable worlds on distant planets, with something going wrong and the aliens attacking, picking off a group of space travelers, one-by-one. It’s also a suggestion (but not proof), that maybe the xenomorphs won’t be fully formed in the film, with some rumours suggesting that Paradise will introduce them as manufactured creatures used during the terraforming process, who only run amok after the process goes wrong (the aliens also take on some of the attributes of the hosts they emerge from, suggesting the possibility that a ‘good’ species might have turned ‘bad’ when the wrong host was used).
Vuture has some other interesting nuggets, such as that Scott’s people wanted Michael Fassbender to play an early android called David, but balked at the amount his agents wanted. There’s also hope of getting Michelle Yeoh to play Vickers, a fortysomething, tough-but-sexy woman. Noomi Rapace is still in the running to play lead character Elizabeth Shaw, although with the buedget still being worked, no official offers have been made to any actors.
Also mentioned is Engineer 1, ‘who were told is to be “played” by a six-foot-five-inch actor, but will actually be entirely CGI, à la Gollum in The Lord of the Rings films.’ Does that mean he may be something to do with the Space Jockey seen in Alien, and which Scott has promised the prequel will explore? We’ll have to wait and see.