10 Movies That Led To Other Movies Being Cancelled (And Why)
9. Ridley Scott's Return To Alien Puts Neill Blomkamp Out Of A Job
A decade ago, Neill Blomkamp was cinema's newest wunderkind, having steered District 9 to critical and commercial success and an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture before he'd even turned 30. However, the law of diminishing returns set in during follow-ups Elysium and Chappie, and it's now been five years since he's even directed a feature film.
At one stage, Blomkamp was developing a new installment in the Alien franchise that would ignore everything that happened after the second film, with Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn set to return for a movie that would serve as a direct follow-up to James Cameron's Aliens.
However, Ridley Scott had recently returned to the fold with Prometheus, and was given the greenlight to craft a sequel after the initial prequel earned over $400m at the box office. It seemed like there was no need to have two Alien movies in development at the same time anymore, and as the architect of the entire series Sir Ridley was never going to take a backseat to the young pretender.
Blomkamps's Alien 5 was quietly shelved in favor of Alien: Covenant, never to be heard from again, and it was Scott himself who publicly hammered the final nail into the coffin as he revealed in a 2017 interview that it wasn't going to happen.