Ridley Scott is keeping expectations down to Earth for FX and Noah Hawley's Alien, a TV show inspired by Scott's classic 1979 sci-fi/horror film of the same name.
The filmmaker briefly touched on Hawley's Alien series, which he's executive producing, during an interview with Independent to promote his historical drama The Last Duel. “It’ll never be as good as the first one,” said Scott, although the outlet noted he was grinning at the time. “That’s what I’ll say.”
Scott's original Alien movie features Sigourney Weaver in her now-iconic role as Ellen Ripley, the only crew member of the commercial space tug Nostromo to survive their encounter with an extraterrestrial known as the Xenomorph. The film gave rise to three sequels from other directors before Scott returned to the franchise with the 2012 prequel/spinoff Prometheus. And while the movie earned mixed-to-positive reviews, grossing $403.4 million against a $130 million budget, Scott claimed its distributor, 20th Century Pictures (back when it was 20th Century Fox), didn't see it as a success.
“I never showed an alien [Xenomorph] in it and the studio... said, ‘See, it didn’t do so well!’ Really?” As such, when Scott released a Prometheus sequel titled Alien: Covenant in 2017, he “put the aliens back in there." However, after Covenant grossed $240.9 million on a budget as high as $111 million, the studio abandoned its plans for additional sequels. “When you’ve got a marvelous beast, it does wear out and you have to actually think again," Scott noted.
Hawley, for his part, isn't trying to compete with Scott's landmark film. "[Ellen Ripley is] one of the great characters of all time, and I think [her] story has been told pretty perfectly, and I don’t want to mess with it," said Hawley in July, explaining why his Alien TV show doesn't feature the Ripley character. Instead, he described the series as "a story about inequality" and corporate greed. "So, it is the story of the people you send to do the dirty work," he added.
The Alien TV show has yet to receive a premiere date. Meanwhile, Scott has The Last Duel opening in theaters on Oct. 15, followed by his biographical crime drama House of Gucci on Nov. 24.
Source: Independent