Fox Confirms Ridley Scott's Next Film Due 2017 Titled 'Alien: Covenant'

It's official. After news hit this morning that the title of the Prometheus sequel would not actually be Alien: Paradise Lost, 20th Century Fox has come to clear up the confusion and confirm the real title. The official title is Alien: Covenant, and the official release date is now October 6th, 2017. Many will also recall that it was revealed Neill Blomkamp's solo spin-off Alien movie has been put on hold. This explains why - even the title of this next one is Alien related, which means they're not taking the same route as Prometheus and pretending like it has nothing to do with Alien (they didn't even mention the word "alien" in any of the marketing material). They also, perhaps, want to distance themselves from the bad taste Prometheus left.

Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created in ALIEN with ALIEN: COVENANT, the second chapter in a prequel trilogy that began with PROMETHEUS -- and connects directly to Scott’s 1979 seminal work of science fiction. Bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, the crew of the colony ship Covenant discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world -- whose sole inhabitant is the "synthetic" David (Michael Fassbender), survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.

Above is the new synopsis released officially by the movie studio for Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant. In a separate interview, Ridley explains (via The Playlist) how he was working on this before doing The Martian: "I was going to be doing what will be called Alien: Covenant, which starts shooting next February, and we were struggling then with the screenplay there and then there was a phone call, somebody saying, 'Listen, we've got this thing which is completely written called 'Martian,' and I said, 'Huh.' And I sped read it in an hour and by mid-afternoon, I talked to Fox." Now, with that setting box office records, he's headed back to space with Alien: Covenant. We'll be watching this one closely for the next two years until arrival in 2017.