Rosa Salazar Says She "Would Play Alita 'Til My Last Breath" [Exclusive]

Alita: Battle Angel was a long-awaited film project. For years, James Cameron was planning to adapt the manga and he even talked about directing it while he was promoting the first Avatar. He ended up producing and co-writing the film for director Robert Rodriguez. While it was not an Avatar-level success, or even a Terminator-level one, Alita hung in there at the box office.Rosa Salazar played the titular cyborg warrior and she was at a Television Critics Association reception for her upcoming Amazon Prime series Undone. Naturally, this meant /Film had a chance to ask Salazar where things stand for an Alita sequel.

One imagines when you sign on to do a film like Alita, you sign on for multiple films. And should there be a sequel, Salazar is on board. And at only 34 years old, she doesn't even set a time limit on when they'd need to get it done."I would play Alita 'til my last breath," Salazar said. "I would, and thanks to the performance capture technology, I probably could."That said, Salazar has not heard anything about a second Alita film yet. She encourages fans to show the studio they want to see more. If the box office wasn't quite enough to do that, there are still ways to show support."Not yet, but buy those Blu-rays," Salazar said, adding out of loyalty to her new show, "On Amazon. But no, I haven't heard anything yet."Salazar was having fun with her answer but she's right. Alita is right at that range where home video will show the studio whether there's life in the franchise. 

Alita: Battle Angel was one of the last films 20th Century Fox distributed before its acquisition by Disney was complete. Disney now has a load of Fox properties to evaluate, including it's Marvel slate of X-Men and Fantastic Four, as well as the Die Hard and Alien franchises. Alita could be lucrative for them, but it's too soon to tell."Yeah, I mean, they had a crazy merger," Salazar said. "People are gaining jobs, people are losing jobs. The whole Disney/Fox acquisition is so involved, this isn't the right time for me to call Alan Horn and be like, 'Hey bro, I know you got a lotta stuff going on, but like what about Alita 2?'"But when she does call Alan Horn, we hope she does address him with "hey bro."

Undone is a fantasy series created with rotoscope animation for Amazon. Her character, Alma, is in an automobile accident and sees her long-deceased father (Bob Odenkirk), who teaches her how to time travel. Salazar was excited to take her Alita performance capture acting to the next level."What I'm really excited about right now, in my own career, is this sort of new thing I've tapped into where I get to fully lose myself in a character because I'm animated," Salazar said. "It's live-action but because the last few things I've been doing are animated, I'm able to completely leave this behind, my body behind and exist in this other dimension as a completely different creature. These character, Alita and Alma, are almost their own people because they are in their own dimension. So I get to completely transform not with prosthetics, not necessarily with makeup or hair, wardrobe but through this other animation process."Alita: Battle Angel is on 4K, Blu-ray, DVD and digital now. Undone premieres September 13.