Neill Blomkamp Reveals More Alien Concept Art, Studio Didn’t Know He Was Working On It

Following up on last night’s batch of concept art from District 9 director Neil Blomkamp’s take on the Alien franchise, the filmmaker has revealed that, while it’s unlikely he’ll ever work on the project, that’s only because the studio “didn’t really know” that he was developing it at all.

Purely conjecture, but that sounds like perhaps a hot, young director proposed a new chapter in a storied franchise and the studio said something along the lines of ,”Sure, we’d take a look at what you put together,” and that’s as far as it got. The fact that there’s a bunch of beautiful pieces of concept art out of it is likely just Blomkamp’s enthusiasm at work.

In any event, you can check out the new images, and some brief Twitter comments from Blomkamp, below.

He did add on Twitter, when pulling through the Instagram post for that final image, that “maybe I’ll go back to it,” which seems to bolster the idea that this was a fairly self-directed pitch and that he, at a minimum, hadn’t been told that the studio wasn’t interested, since there would be no sense in returning to the project if it had been killed at the studio level.

Currently, Blomkamp is working on a feature-length version of his short film Chappie. The Alien franchise is mostly in progress at Dark Horse Comics, with Prometheus leading the charge in cinemas, looking at a different era of the property’s history.