The cliffhanger that closed Alien: Covenant back in 2017 may finally get its payoff. Ridley Scott has confirmed that a third Alien prequel is in the works, picking up the thread he left dangling nearly a decade ago.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Scott said the new film will center on Michael Fassbender’s synthetic antagonist David, following the android as he builds a “brave new world for himself.” It’s a fitting focus. David has quietly become the beating heart of Scott’s prequel run, evolving from Weyland Corporation’s obedient tool in Prometheus into a self-styled creator conducting nightmarish experiments on the colonists of Covenant.
Scott’s fascination isn’t just with the character — it’s with what David represents. “AIs can go off,” he told the paper. “And if they do, it’s like a bomb.” The director, now firmly a skeptic of the technology reshaping his industry, said he’d rather make movies about artificial intelligence than lean on it. For now he reckons he “can compete with an AI without any problem,” but he’s uneasy about a future in which the machines grow “smarter than we are.” Coming from the filmmaker who gave us HAL’s spiritual descendants, that’s a warning worth noting.
Here’s the catch: the Alien timeline is more crowded than ever. Scott launched the franchise with 1979’s original before circling back with two prequels, Prometheus (2012) and Covenant (2017). Then came Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, slotted between the first and second films and largely disconnected from Scott’s David saga aside from a few nods. It paid off commercially, grossing over $100 million more than Covenant on a smaller budget, and a follow-up is now in pre-production with filming planned to begin later this year.
On top of that, FX’s Alien: Earth — a prequel series set after Scott’s films but before the 1979 original — has been renewed for a second season, with cameras expected to roll later this year or in early 2027.
That makes Scott’s return a genuine surprise. With Romulus‘s sequel, a new season of Earth, and now a Covenant follow-up all jostling for space, the franchise is spreading across the timeline the way Xenomorph spores spread across a hull. Whether audiences can keep the threads straight is another question — but for fans who’ve spent nine years wondering what David did next, that’s a problem worth having.
