Ridley Scott Says Alien: Covenant Sequel Is Still Happening, With Michael Fassbender's David at the Centre

Ridley Scott says a sequel to Alien: Covenant is still in the works, and Michael Fassbender's homicidal android David would be at its centre. Speaking to the L.A. Times in an interview published 26 August 2026, Scott described the character picking up where Covenant left off: "AIs can go off. And if they do, it's like a bomb" (The Hollywood Reporter).

Scott's vision, as he laid it out, would see David "creating a brave new world for himself" — a thread left dangling since Covenant's 2017 release, where the synthetic survivor of the doomed colony ship Covenant sets course for a distant planet with a cargo of colonists and a cache of alien embryos. Fassbender played twin androids in that film: the benevolent Walter and the amoral David, a performance that drew wide praise. The Hollywood Reporter went so far as to call Alien: Covenant "actually a Blade Runner sequel in disguise," singling out Fassbender as the best part of the film (The Hollywood Reporter).

The project, though, is not alone in the Alien pipeline. A sequel to Fede Álvarez's 2024 hit Alien: Romulus is in development at 20th Century Fox, with Álvarez stepping aside from the director's chair to produce. Scott's Covenant follow-up would compete for a greenlight against that title — meaning the studio may weigh two Alien continuations before committing to either (The Hollywood Reporter).

Scott originally conceived Covenant as the first of three films that would bridge the prequel storyline to his 1979 original Alien, a plan he articulated as far back as November 2015 (The Hollywood Reporter). Whether the new sequel would still serve that connective purpose remains an open question.

The L.A. Times interview covered more than the xenomorph franchise. Scott also weighed in on Blade Runner 2099, the limited series arriving on Prime Video on 25 November 2026. He holds an executive producer credit but is not creatively involved — a consequence, he explained, of letting the rights slip away. "Somehow we let the rights go," Scott said. "When you're not the author of the actual written word, you don't have a piece." The original Blade Runner sequel, 2017's Blade Runner 2049, was directed by Denis Villeneuve after Scott's scheduling conflict with Covenant forced him to step down — a disappointment he voiced publicly at the time (Screen Daily).

On artificial intelligence, Scott was blunt. He does not use AI in his own filmmaking. "I can compete with an AI without any problem making images," he said. "But it's coming, inevitably" (The Hollywood Reporter).

For now, Scott is focused on a different post-apocalypse. The Dog Stars, his adaptation of Peter Heller's 2012 novel about survivors of a deadly pandemic, opens in theatres on Friday, 28 August 2026.

Scott also had kind words for the small-screen corner of the Alien universe. The first season of Noah Hawley's Alien: Earth television series, he said, was "pretty damn good" (The Hollywood Reporter).

For fans, the takeaway is that Scott has not let go of the thread he started pulling with Prometheus in 2012 — even as the franchise has branched into television and a parallel film series. Whether the studio gives him the greenlight to finish what he started is, as ever, a decision for the people who control the ledger.