Ridley Scott has seen Fede Álvarez's Alien sequel and loves it
In Ridley Scott’s office, no one can hear Fede Álvarez scream
For all the talk of Alien sequels over the last few years, we haven’t heard much about the one from Fede Álvarez, the director of Don’t Breathe and 2013’s Evil Dead. We know Neill Blomkamp isn’t directing an Alien and that Noah Hawley has a TV series on the way. As for Álvarez, his film is done and ready for Ridley Scott’s discerning eye.
Appearing yesterday at the DGA Latino Summit in Los Angeles, Álvarez was in conversation with Guillermo del Toro and revealed that his director’s cut of Alien: Romulus is complete. Whether there’s still time to change the subtitle to anything other than Romulus is unclear, but he did go through “the incredibly tense process” of sending the movie to Ridley Scott, who produced the film.
Despite hearing that Scott was “really tough on Blade Runner 2049,” which Álvarez called a “masterpiece,” and thought Top Gun: Maverick was “meh,” the director wanted to show Scott the movie “before anybody.” We’ve got a lot of respect for a director who wants to rip that Band-Aid off and do the stupidest thing anyone can do: Show Ridley Scott their movie.
“Even if he didn’t ask for it, I was gonna go there and sit at a table and look at him and get it,” Álvarez said. “Even if he was gonna say, ‘You destroyed my legacy,’ I wanted to be in front of him and see him in the eye. I didn’t want to get an email where it says, ‘Ridley says…’”
All this belly achin’ was for naught because Scott walked into the room and said, “‘Fede, what can I say? It’s fucking great.’”
“My family knows it was one of the best moments of my life to have a master like him, whom I admire so much, to even watch a movie I made, particularly something like this, and talk to me for an hour about what he liked about it. One of the best compliments he said was, ‘The dialogue is great. Are you the writer?’ Yes!”
Alien: Romulus will be an unconnected entry into the Alien canon and follows “a group of young people on a distant world, who find themselves in a confrontation with the most terrifying life form in the universe.” Yup, it sounds like an Alien movie.
Alien: Romulus bursts through the chest cavity and into theaters in August 2024.