Director Ridley Scitte has revealed the title to his upcoming sequel to his 2012 Alien prequel Prometheus. The new film, which goes into production early next year, will be known as Alien: Paradise Lost.
Scott told Hey U Guys that the title is inspired by John Milton’s classic novel. “There’s a similarity to it, but that’s where it stops.”
Alien: Paradise Lost is set to star Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender, the only two characters to make it to the end of Prometheus and will pick up where they were left, heading out into space to track down the homeworld of the alien Engineers, who created the horrific xenomorph aliens of the Alien franchise.
Milton’s epic poem deals with the fall of Satan from Heaven, the creation of sin and the ultimate expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Given that the opening of Prometheus had some Biblical allusion in the film’s prologue showing Engineers seeding prehistoric Earth with DNA material that will eventual create humans, I am intrigued as to how Scott hopes to expand on that idea in this new film. It certainly offers a clue as to where the story may be heading.
Scott is currently doing the publicity rounds right now for his upcoming science-fiction tale of survival The Martian, which opens next Friday, October 2. Yesterday the director stated that the upcoming Prometheus sequel wouldn’t quite join up that film with the Alien franchise yet and that it would be a few more installments before that would happen.
[The direct link between Prometheus and Alien] won’t be in the next one. It will be in the one after this one or maybe even a fourth film before we get back into the ‘Alien’ franchise… The whole point of it is to explain the ‘Alien’ franchise and to explain the how and why of the creation of the Alien itself. I always thought of the Alien as kind of a piece of bacterial warfare. I always thought that that original ship, which I call the Croissant, was a battleship, holding these biomechanoid creatures that were all about destruction.
Alien: Paradise Lost has a release date of May 30, 2017.
It’s Noomi Rapace, not Rooney Mara, who was in Prometheus.