Michael Fassbender’s David, the android who looked at his makers, looked at their makers, and concluded he could do better than either, may finally be getting the third act Ridley Scott has been promising since 2017. The Hollywood Reporter says Aaron Guzikowski, writer of Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners and creator of HBO Max’s Raised by Wolves, has been hired to write a new Alien film for 20th Century Studios, and that its story ties back to Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The connective tissue, according to the trade’s sources, is David.
Scott is producing with Michael Pruss through Scott Free, but he is not currently set to direct, and nobody else is attached either. Nor is Fassbender, which leaves the project in the curious position of being built around a character whose actor hasn’t yet agreed to play him. Scott Aversano is overseeing the film at the studio, and Scott reportedly brought Guzikowski in to get things moving after years of talking up a trilogy-closer in interviews.
It is, pointedly, not a sequel to Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, which did very nicely in 2024 by going back to basics: dark corridors, young people making poor decisions and an android having a bad day at the office. A follow-up to that one is said to be in limbo, which in this franchise is a considerable step up from being cocooned.
On paper, Guzikowski makes sense. Raised by Wolves was essentially a two-season argument about androids bringing up human children, with Scott directing its first two episodes and lending it the same chalky, cheerless palette as his prequels. HBO Max cancelled it on a cliffhanger, so the man knows all about stories that stop before they finish. Which brings us back to Covenant, which ended with David having quietly murdered and replaced his fellow synthetic Walter, tucked Katherine Waterston’s Daniels into hypersleep, and settled down to tend a colony ship’s worth of sleeping settlers and smuggled facehugger embryos. This is, remember, the same android who attributed Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to Byron, an error no English teacher would ever forgive, and one Walter was too polite to mention. Look on his works, ye mighty, and pack a flamethrower.
The prequels remain the franchise’s great dinner-party divider. For every viewer who relished their big, chewy questions about creation and creators, there’s another still shouting about a geologist who got lost in a cave he had personally mapped. A film that leans fully into David as the series’ true monster, rather than the chap in the xenomorph suit, is either the boldest move the studio could make or an excellent way to annoy half the audience. Quite possibly both.
The news lands in a melancholy week for the Nostromo crew, following the death of Tom Skerritt, whose Captain Dallas climbed into the air ducts in 1979 so that Ripley could climb out of them. We said our goodbyes to him here. For now, the David film has no director, no cast and no release date, only a writer and a direction of travel. Given what happened to the last people who followed David into the dark, we’d advise bringing a torch.
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