Alien 5 Has Just Been OFFICIALLY Confirmed

Even before Prometheus hit Ridley Scott was bigging up a sequel that would run even more with the idea of the origins of the xenomorphs. Over the past couple of years he's teased more and more, most recently with the release of The Martian where he revealed the movie (whose production meant Neill Blomkamp's Alien project was thankfully shelved) would be going back to the original series, titled Alien: Paradise Lost. Then it was Alien: Covenant and then it was this or that and it was impossible to really know what on LV-426 was going on. Well, now we can stop taking conflicting interview snippets as fact and speculation as truth; 20th Century Fox have just released a press release officially confirming Alien: Covenant for 6th October 2017. So it's simultaneously Prometheus 2, Alien 5 and the eighth in the franchise (if you count Alien Vs. Predator, which sadly we kinda have to). But that's not all - we've already got a plot synopsis that reveals what the story will broadly be. Check it out below:

Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created in ALIEN with ALIEN: COVENANT, the second chapter in a prequel trilogy that began with PROMETHEUS - and connects directly to Scott€™s 1979 seminal work of science fiction. Bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, the crew of the colony ship Covenant discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world - whose sole inhabitant is the "synthetic" David (Michael Fassbender), survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.

OK, now this is interesting. Prometheus ended with David and Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) jetting off to find the Engineer's homeworld, but this seems to jump forward, putting the android on the new world (no indication what happened to the recently caesareaned Shaw) and introducing a whole new crew of jobbing astronauts to discover how difficult it is to scream in space. Also note the official confirmation that this is going to be a prequel trilogy, reaffirming how the whole Prometheus enterprise was envisioned as a multi-movie enterprise. Hopefully this time around we'll get some proper answers, rather than just even more black goo-infused questions. Whatever explanation we're given, I'm excited to be getting more Alien, especially under the stewardship of Scott, and now a release date is confirmed I'm going to officially start getting hyped for this one. Alien: Covenant will be released on 6th October 2017.