Artnewspress: Fede Álvarez’s as-yet-untitled upcoming Alien movie is setting out to bring the franchise back to its horror roots by copying the most terrifying trick from the original film. The new Alien movie is part of Disney’s ongoing effort to cash in on all the lucrative franchises it acquired in its merger with 21st Century Fox. Starring Cailee Spaeny and Isabela Merced, the Alien sequel is scheduled to be released on August 16, 2024. It was originally slated for a straight-to-streaming release on Hulu, but it’s since shifted to a theatrical release so audiences can experience the intergalactic terror on the big screen.
After the original Alien film emerged as one of the greatest horror movies ever made, its sequels have dabbled in other genres with varying degrees of success. Aliens is a high-octane action movie, Alien 3 is a prison movie in space, and Prometheus is a straightforward science fiction epic about the origins of intelligent life. The new Alien movie is going back to the horror roots that made the original so great – and Álvarez is the perfect filmmaker for the job.
Don’t Breathe Proves Why Álvarez Is The Perfect Alien Director
Álvarez proved his ability to direct a satisfying follow-up to a horror classic with his fan-favorite 2013 Evil Dead reboot, but the film that really demonstrates what makes him the perfect director for an Alien movie is his chilling thriller Don’t Breathe. Don’t Breathe flips the home invasion genre on its head by positioning the cash-strapped burglars as the protagonists and the gun-toting sadist they’re robbing as the villain. Just like the original Alien movie, Don’t Breathe is a quintessential work of full-blown survival horror.
With his sure-handed direction of Don’t Breathe, Álvarez recaptured exactly the same tension and claustrophobia that made the first Alien movie so powerful, without needing to be an out-and-out gore fest. Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror opus is essentially a haunted house movie in space. Despite its very different setting (switching a cargo freighter in space for a dilapidated home on Earth), Don’t Breathe has a very similar style to the original Alien film: its heroes are picked off one by one by a malicious entity lurking in the shadows.
Disney’s Alien Sequel Can Redeem The Franchise (& Álvarez’s Recent Horror Movies)
The new Alien movie isn’t just an opportunity to redeem this beloved franchise and its hit-and-miss history of sequels and prequels; it’s a chance for Álvarez to redeem his last couple of lackluster horror movies. Álvarez wrote and produced Don’t Breathe 2, which fell far short of the original by reimagining the sadistic villain Norman Nordstrom as a more sympathetic antihero, and Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, which embodied everything wrong with the blood-soaked, scare-free sequels to Tobe Hooper’s groundbreaking 1974 masterpiece. Álvarez can make up for the missteps of those movies with an intense, nail-biting Alien film.
