[Update: Ridley Scott explains Alien: Paradise Lost title and teases plot details]
77 year-old legendary director Ridley Scott is showing no signs of slowing down. He's currently promoting and enjoying the positive early reviews for his adaptation of The Martian while teasing plans for his next project, a sequel to Prometheus.
Previous reports had Prometheus 2 beginning principal photography in early 2016 in Australia and Scott has since confirmed that this will indeed be his next project, not Blade Runner 2 (which Denis Villeneuve is directing instead). Michael Fassbender's scene-stealing android David will return with Prometheus protagonist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) but for anyone expecting the film to make amends for its predecessor's confusing connections to Alien, it will not. That's what the other sequels are for.
Speaking to German publication Filmfutter, Scott teased that he's planning Prometheus 3 and 4 already and that the ultimate goal of the series will be for it to end by setting up the original Alien.
"The whole point is to explain the Alien franchise and how and why the creation of the aliens. I always thought of the Alien as kind of a piece of bacterial warfare. I always thought that that original ship, which I call the Croissant, was a battleship, holding these biomechanoid creatures that were all about destruction."
The quotes are translated via The Guardian from German, and when asked if his Prometheus movies will directly tie into Alien, Scott said they would, but not until a third or fourth Prometheus.
"Yes, but it will not be the next one. It will be in the one after this one or maybe even a fourth film before we get back into the Alien franchise."
Despite the Xeno tease at the end of Prometheus and knowing where this series of films is headed, there will be no Xenomorphs in Prometheus 2. Scott has teased in interviews that they've found the "next step" of alien movie monsters instead and that the Engineers were a "good start"; he later added once the script was finished that its third act will reveal a "fresher form of alien."
When asked on her thoughts, Rapace - who previously specified she didn't know the story of the Prometheus sequel - has said she hopes for Shaw to find the dark paradise she's looking for and that there she may find God or the Devil. That's an interesting remark, given the themes of the first film and knowing that original drafts of the Prometheus script by Jon Spaihts (then called Alien: Engineers) saw the Engineers as the creators of humanity, where Jesus was essentially an Engineer, too.
Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Chappie) is currently working on Alien 5 and hopes to continue the story of the original two Alien films, that ones he favors, and Scott is serving as a producer on that project, too. Alien 5 has a final title already, but it's too revealing to announce just yet. Blomkamp did have to make one major change to its story in order to not conflict with Scott's own plans for the Prometheus series - something that may allow them to properly intersect down the road. They're building their own shared universe, just like everyone (?) else is.
[Update: Ridley Scott explains Alien: Paradise Lost title and teases plot details]
Prometheus 2 (official title TBA) is slated to begin filming in early 2016; we'll let you know when it gets an official release date.
Source: Filmfutter