Prometheus 2 Is Actually Called Alien: Paradise Lost

UPDATE 9.24.15:

While promoting his new film, The Martian, director Ridley Scott revealed to Hey U Guys that his next film, a Prometheus sequel, isn’t called “Prometheus 2” at all.

Instead, the movie will be called Alien: Paradise Lost, and Mr. Scott will remind you that he indeed used John Milton’s epic poem as an inspiration for the title. 

From the man himself:

Actually, it’s going to be called Alien: Paradise Lost, so Prometheus 2 isn’t what it’s really going to be. You know the poem? I doubt you’ve ever been through it, have you? The poem’s a book, Paradise Lost! It sounds intellectual, but there’s a similarity to it, and that’s where it stops.

Here’s the interview:

Alien: Paradise Lost is out on May 30, 2017. 

UPDATE 9.14.15:

With early reviews for his new film, The Martian, suggesting he might have something special on his hands, director Ridley Scott has 100% confirmed that his next project will be directing Prometheus 2. Chatting to Deadline about the movie, he said that “Fassbender will do this one with me, and it’s meant to start production in February. I’m in prep, now. I’ll either shoot in Aussie, or here.”

As for what to expact?

“You can either say, leave the first film alone and jump ahead, but you can’t because it ends on too specific a plot sentence as she says, I want to go where they came from,” Scott said.

“I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I thought the subtext of that film was a bit florid and grandiose, but it asks a good question: who created us? I don’t think we are here by accident. I find it otherwise hard to believe you and I are sitting here at this table, because the molecular miracles that would have had to occur were in the trillions, since the first sign of human life that crawled out of the mud with four fingers, would bloody well be impossible, unless there was some guidance system. Also, you have the sun approximately the same distance from earth as it is from maybe millions of planets and planetoids that are almost identical distance and therefore enjoy the value of sunlight on their soil. Are you telling me there are no other planets with human life? I simply don’t believe it.”

Scott added of the film that “it is pretty grand thinking, and that’s what I want to explore. You’ve got to go back and find those engineers and see what they are thinking. If engineers are the forerunners of us, and therefore were creators of life forms in places that were possible for biology to function, who created that? Where’s the big boy? You think this was all an accident? I don’t know. Even Stephen Hawking now says, I am not sure. He no longer believes in the big bang.”

The full piece is at Deadline here.

Our earlier story, from the end of August, is here…

There were suggestions at one stage that Ridley Scott would pass on directing the sequel to Prometheus, and take a producer role on the new movie. After all, his slate of projects is hardly small, and he’s making major, complicated films at a rate of one a year right now. His next, The Martian, is due out in the autumn.

In recent months, it then started to look as if he was interested once more in directing Prometheus 2 himself, and so it became a case of seeing where the film would land on his slate. Pretty much right now is the answer. The movie is reported to head into production early in 2016, and chatting to Empire, he’s confirmed what he’s up to next.

“I was already on to my next movie,” Scott said, when asked how he dealt with the bringing forward of The Martian‘s release date. “I was starting to look for locations for my next movie, which is Prometheus 2.”

This in turns suggests that the rumor Prometheus 2 should come before Neill Blomkamp’s Alien 5 on the schedule had substance to it. It sounds as if Prometheus 2 is being readied for release in 2017, and that would leave 2018 open for Alien 5.

More on both films as we hear it…

Empire.