Alien 3 went through a lot of weird and wacky concepts before it settled on the novel idea of being set on a prison planet, with Sigourney Weaver's Ripley the only woman the exclusively mail populace had seen in years. Before that, however, there were plans for it to be set in a future mall, a planet made of wood, or even Earth. Our own pale blue dot was also considered as the location for 1997's Alien: Resurrection, the last proper instalment in the franchise. Ultimately the filmmakers again went for scary stuff happening on a space ship. In fact, every Alien film is either on an alien planet and/or a space ship. It's only the Alien Vs Predator movies that shifted the action to Earth and, really, they should be forgotten as quickly as the plot of Resurrection was by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Will Blomkamp's film follow the other films into the stars, or will he bring things back home possibly even to his native South Africa, where most of his other films have been set?
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
