The upcoming Alien: Covenant will bridge the gap between 2012’s confusing Prometheus and the original 1979 sci-fi horror classic, but director Ridley Scott has big plans for the franchise after that. In a recent interview where he laid out what’s next for Alien, Scott might’ve accidentally let the name of the next movie in the series slip: Awakening.
While speaking to Fandango at South by Southwest, the renown director explained what the series’s timeline would look like. Covenant, the newest film, is both a prequel and a sequel, so there are naturally lots of questions about where things are going looking forward.
“There will be another one before we kind of literally and logically, clockwise, back into the rear back head of [the original] Alien,” Scott said. “It will go Prometheus, Awakening, Covenant… fairly integral where this colonization ship is on the way….”
At this point, Covenant’s star Katherine Waterston jumped in to stop Scott from giving anything else away. This was the first time we’ve heard Awakening mentioned, so it’s presumably the title of the next installment. Curiously, Scott listed it before Covenant. He could have just made a mistake and jumbled up the chronological order of the movies, but if he didn’t, that would mean that Awakening is a prequel to a movie that was a sequel to a movie that was a prequel to a movie. Hmm.
Ridley Scott speaks to someone who is being attacked by an alien.
Although the timeline of the current movies, let alone future films, is confusing enough already, Scott did clearly state that none of the new movies would take place after the original Alien. It’s unclear, though, exactly how many more movies there are going to be.
“If Covenant is successful, and then the next one, and then there will definitely be three more,” Scott said. Assuming the next one is Awakening, we could potentially have four additional Alien movies in the works.
But, that’s all in the future. Now we just need to wait until May 19 when Alien: Covenant comes out in theaters. In the meantime, watch a new international trailer for the film, which dropped today.
