Alien remains one of the best sci-fi/horror films ever made, even almost 40 years later. It not only launched a massive (and continuing) film franchise and Sigourney Weaver's career, it also firmly established Ridley Scott as a competent director with a strong grasp of story, character, and ambiance. And while it can be argued that Scott's efforts to reclaim the "Alienverse" as his own have fallen short so far with Prometheus, there are high hopes for the upcoming sci-fi sequel, Alien: Covenant.

That film will pick up following the events of Prometheus which left only Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and the android David (Michael Fassbender) alive/functioning to carry on the story. But thanks to Scott's comments in a new interview, it looks like Covenant might not be a direct sequel after all but rather something a little further on down the line. Fandango sat down with Scott to talk about all things Alien, and the chat revealed some interesting insight into the shared Alienverse that's still in progress, like the plan for the next film after Covenant, followed by an entirely new Alien trilogy.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

As for Alien: Covenant, here's Scott's take on the themes as opposed to those in Prometheus:

"It's beginning to answer the who and why. It's definitely gorier, and smarter. In it we raise some very interesting questions about the position and possibility of AI against human condition, and it crosses into the zone of apartheid -- kind of like how Roy Batty was treated like a second class citizen. And so is David. The knee-jerk was to create a second class citizen, even if he is superior to everyone. So the natural thing to do at the end of Prometheus was to send them off together because when you think you've got it, you've got to keep the characters alive, as opposed to killing them. And [Coventant] starts to answer the who and why."

The "them" in question includes David and Rapace's Elizabeth Shaw, who will also return in Alien: Covenant, Scott confirmed, but not in any traditional way:

"Yes, in a way. Not fully, but in a way. She was integral to what David carried out later."

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Depending on how Covenant performs, Scott sees at least four more films in his "Alienverse", all of which will eventually connect back up to the original film:

"If this is successful, and then the next one, and then there will definitely be three more."

We know that script work is already underway for the follow-up to Covenant. He also appeared to have let slip a potential title for an Alien film we have yet to see:

"It will go Prometheus, Awakening, Covenant.. fairly integral where this colonization ship is on the way...."

So to recap, the Prometheus Trilogy will include Covenant and Awakening, with a new trilogy taking place between it and the original Alien film. This jibes, somewhat, with what Scott and Prometheus scribe Damon Lindelof talked about years ago when a sequel to the sci-fi film was still in the planning stages. Scott's aim was to answer the questions posed in Prometheus, along with the following:

“From the very beginning, I was working from a premise that lent itself to a sequel. I really don’t want to meet God in the first one. I want to leave it open to [Noomi Rapace’s character, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw] saying, ‘I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I want to go where they came from ... I’d love to explore where the hell [Dr. Shaw] goes next and what does she do when she gets there, because if it is paradise, paradise can not be what you think it is. Paradise has a connotation of being extremely sinister and ominous ... I know where it’s going. I know that to keep [David] alive is essential and to keep [Elizabeth] alive is essential and to go where they came from, not where I came from, is essential.”

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Paradise was a title thrown around back before they landed on Prometheus instead, but perhaps we'll see it pop up in the future. There's always the possibility that Scott will get to play out his frustrations with religion on screen:

“It’s interesting to do a sequel because this leaves the door so open to some huge questions. The real question to me is – the more mankind discovers in science the more clear and helpful everything becomes, yet we’re very bad at managing ourselves. And one of the biggest problems in the world is what we call religion, it causes more problems than anything in the goddamn universe. Think about what’s happening now, all based on the very simple idea that a Muslim can’t live alongside a Catholic, or a Catholic can’t live alongside a Protestant… We definitely did [have that in the script], and then we thought it was a little too on the nose. But if you look at it as an ‘our children are misbehaving down there’ scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, ‘Let's send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it. Guess what? They crucified him.’”

For more on Alien, be sure to check out our recent write-ups below: