Neill Blomkamp's Next Film Is His 'Alien' Reimagining

We're going to see that Neill Blomkamp Alien movie after all.

Details are scarce but Wednesday afternoon, the District 9 and Chappie director tweeted that his radical reimagining of the Alien universe – which was first revealed via concept art – will "officially" be his next film. Variety then confirmed the fact with 20th Century Fox and found out Ridley Scott is producing. Read more below.

UPDATE Feb. 18: Here's the tweet in question. Variety confirmed with 20th Century Fox that a deal has been closed for Blomkamp to make an Alien movie and it's not Prometheus 2.

Here's the original story from February 10 where Blomkamp suggested the movie was all but read to get made. A fact we now know is happening:

February 10: This year kicked off with a bang when District 9 and Chappie writer/director Neill Blomkamp posted Alien concept images to Instagram. The pics featured renderings of Sigourney Weaver's character Ellen Ripley, the Hicks character originally played by Michael Biehn, and images of the engineers' ship from Alien housed in a giant hangar.

There wasn't much explanation of the images: were they for a film, or maybe a game? Had Blomkamp created them on his own, or as part of a quiet deal that hadn't leaked outside Fox? Now the director reveals the truth about his Alien ideas — and he says that he could actually make the Alien movie heralded by the concept art. He just has to decide to do it.

Blomkamp talked to Uproxx, and the interview is surprisingly candid. The director explained that the art came out of a long-simmering desire to make an Alien movie.

Basically, what happened was, when Chappie got heavily into post-production, I could take my foot off the gas a bit. I was thinking about what I wanted to do next and I've been wanting to make an Alien film for like years and years.

The art came into being as the director was working on the post-process of Chappie, and he says we've only seen the beginning of it, teasing "I produced way more art than I put out."

This all came about thanks to working with Sigourney Weaver on Chappie, which comes as a surprise to no one.

Speaking to Sigourney Weaver, when we were doing Chappie, she set off a bunch of thoughts in my head — I had come up with an idea that didn't have Sigourney, it was a different idea. But I spent all of the shooting time with her, it was like, holy shit, that could actually be really interesting. When I came back to Vancouver, I had an entire year to work on Chappie. And when I wasn't needed in the edit, I could think about Alien. So, I basically developed an entire movie and I did all of this artwork as well.

Blomkamp says he's not giving up on the idea, and that Fox isn't the roadblock to making it happen. According to him, it's his own attitude about doing a franchise movie that keeps things at the theoretical stage. ("Sometimes Hollywood just sort of gets to me.") If he gets his head around making it, Blomkamp says it's a go.

Seriously, he's certain about this:

Me. I'm the problem. Fox, they would make it. Like, tomorrow. They would make it.

As a refresher, here's the art.