9 Years Later, Alien Could Finally Be Fixing Its Biggest Plot Hole
Get ready to be reacquainted with everyone's favorite narcissistic android.
Ever since Ridley Scott first changed science fiction and horror forever with his 1979 masterwork Alien, the Xenomorph and the legacy it leaves behind have been pretty inescapable on-screen. The 80s gave us James Cameron’s beloved action-heavy sequel Aliens, the 90s gave us the studio-manipulated (but bold swings nonetheless) missteps of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, and while not official canon entries, the 2000s gave us the surprisingly fun B-movie Alien vs Predator and its much darker (literally) and reviled sequel AvP: Requiem.
The series persists to this day, carried throughout the 2010s by a long-gestating prequel series by Ridley Scott before 20th Century Fox’s acquisition by Disney resulted in 2024’s relatively safe Greatest Hits installment Alien: Romulus. While the film was undoubtedly a success (grossing $350 million on an $80 million budget), and Scott’s second prequel, Alien: Covenant, underperformed at the box office, it’s a shame that such an intriguing (albeit initially unwanted) and subversive take on the franchise’s origins was sidelined the way it was. But if Scott’s recent comments are to be believed, there might still be hope yet for a third movie to cap off the trilogy – and to resolve the story of one of the series’ most fascinating characters.
Despite the mixed reaction to Prometheus back in 2012, David has emerged as one of the best additions to the Alien mythos.
In a recent interview with the LA Times to discuss his most recent film, The Dog Stars, Ridley Scott casually mentioned that a third installment is in the works for his Alien prequel series, which began with 2012’s Prometheus and was continued with 2017’s aforementioned Alien: Covenant.
According to him, the movie will pick up with Michael Fassbender’s David, forging a “brave new world for himself.” Since his introduction in Prometheus as Peter Weyland’s all-too-curious and fatally human android companion, David has quickly become one of the most acclaimed and thought-provoking characters in the Alien franchise; according to a rumor from the website World of Reel, Fede Álvarez had plans to bring David back in a sequel to Alien: Romulus only for them to be shot down by Ridley Scott, but the character has even transcended the silver screen with an appearance in the 2024-2025 Aliens vs Avengers comic book crossover.
The last time we saw David, he was transporting several frozen Xenomorph embryos to a new human colony after switching places with the Covenant’s altruistic synthetic crew member Walter (his robot identical twin), much to the horror of Katherine Waterson’s final girl,Daniels.
It’s a cliffhanger that was ignored by Romulus — mostly because Romulus takes place after Alien and before Aliens, rather than in the time for Alien, like Covenant.
Still, if the Alien franchise returned to the post-Covenant, pre-Alien timeline, there’s plenty to explore. Since we first met him, David has longed for the opportunity to create life of his own, and after birthing an early form of Xenomorphs on the barren Engineer homeworld where he’s discovered in Alien: Covenant, what could be a better place for experimentation than a budding human colony?
Watching David’s evolve from a downtrodden servant to the AI God of a new species (a trajectory that evokes the tragedy of Icarus) is just one of the things that makes Ridley Scott’s prequel films so engaging, and it’s exciting for fans of them to know that there might be a resolution coming after all.
