What Happened Next? - 9 Planned Movie Sequels That Were Cancelled
8. Alien: Covenant 2
Alien: Covenant's weak box-office numbers (and the looming Disney-Fox merger) have all-but killed any chances of its sequel happening.
But Ridley Scott was actually planning a followup to Covenant while he was making it. His ultimate goal? To link up directly with the first Alien.
He even had a finished script for the project (rumoured to be titled Alien: Awakening), and, on several occasions, has offered some details about what direction its story would have taken.
Despite the Alien movies being about, y'know, the aliens, Scott was intent on having a Covenant sequel focus less on Xenomorphs, and more on A.I. characters, as he revealed on the Empire Podcast:
“I think the evolution of the Alien himself is nearly over, but what I was trying to do was transcend and move to another story, which would be taken over by A.I.’s. The world that the A.I. might create as a leader if he finds himself on a new planet. We have actually quite a big layout for the next one.”
Presumably, this means the film would follow Michael Fassbender's A.I. character David, on a new planet, continuing his twisted Xenomorph experiments and acting as the god/ultimate creator on this new world. There's clearly more to explore with the character, as evidenced by him hijacking a ship of human colonists in Covenant.
Additionally, Scott has mentioned that the Engineers had a bigger role to play in the Alien universe. In a 2017 video interview, he stated that the sequel would find the Engineers "arriving back to find their planet decimated" (which we saw in Covenant).
Since David was the one responsible for that decimation, this proposed A.I./Engineer story combination seems to click together quite nicely. Maybe the Engineers choose to hunt David down, arrive at his planet, and are greeted by his Xenomorph creations.
And that... sounds bloody awesome.