A few weeks back, District 9 director Neill Blomkamp took to Instagram, and started posting some intriguing concept art for a fifth Alien installment, entitled Alien Xeno, that he was working on for 20th Century Fox that had supposedly fallen through. As you can see from some of the images dotted around this page, his vision of the long running franchise is pretty bad-ass, with Bill Paxton's Hudson from Aliens making a return, and Ripley wearing a helmet taking some design cues from the head of a Xenomorph. Blomkamp has gone on record that he is a massive Alien fan, and, being one of the strongest creative voices tackling sci-fi at the moment, just by looking at a handful of concept art makes you wish an Alien movie with him at the helm was a reality.
Well, fear not! Blomkamp has taken to social media again to announce that, yes, Alien 5 (no word on the official title as of yet) will be his next film after he wraps up promoting Chappie, out March 6th. It's very, very early days yet, so we have no idea what direction this new installment will take, and whether or not Sigourney Weaver, not to mention any of the cast of the previous movies, will return. It's also unknown if this turn of events was always on the cards for Fox and they were taking their sweet time in committing to it, or if the posting of the concept art was a calculated experiment to gauge public interest in the project. No matter what route this project took on its way to been green lit, I couldn't be happier to see Blomkamp offer his own take on the franchise.
