Five years and one impending follow-up later, Ridley Scott is owning up to the shortcomings of Prometheus, his 2012 prequel to the Alien franchise. No, not the plot holes or flat characterization, but rather, the lack of the titular aliens. Scott tells Yahoo Movies U.K. that while he was originally adamant about keeping the Xenomorphs out of his prequels, his decision ended up putting off audiences, whom he now realizes were actually bursting with anticipation to see the iconic monsters stalking Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace.
It took him a while to learn this lesson, though, as he was telling reporters as recently as 2014 that the “Beast is done. Cooked.” But Scott now recognizes “that [the fans] were really frustrated. They wanted to see more of the original [monster] and I thought he was definitely cooked, with an orange in his mouth. So I thought: ‘Wow, OK, I’m wrong’.” So the bitch’s forebears will be back for Alien: Covenant, as well as the sequel Scott’s already working on. But not for Alien 5, which was recently jettisoned by Scott himself.