As the director of the last unequivocally good Alien movie—come at us, AVP: Requiem fans—James Cameron’s word carries a certain weight with the monster-blasting franchise. So when he says it might be time to hang up the exoskeletons, grab your cocoon goo, and call it a day, he might possibly have a point.
“I don’t think it’s worked out terribly well,” Cameron told Vulture recently, while promoting his upcoming National Geographic special Atlantis Rising. “I think we’ve moved on beyond it. It’s like, okay, we’ve got it, we’ve got the whole Freudian biomechanoid meme. I’ve seen it in 100 horror films since. I think both of those films stand at a certain point in time, as a reference point. But is there any validity to doing another one now?”
But, Cameron was quick to add, that doesn’t mean he’s not going to see the next Alien movie, Ridley Scott’s Covenant, when it hits theaters on May 17, 2017. “Let me just add to that—and don’t cut this part off, please—I will stand in line for any Ridley Scott movie, even a not-so-great one,” he remarked. “Because he is such an artist, he’s such a filmmaker. I always learn from him. And what he does with going back to his own franchise would be fascinating.” (True to his word, Cameron told Moviefone back in 2012 that he saw Scott’s previous Alien-ish movie, Prometheus, in theaters twice.)