‘Alien 5’: Sigourney Weaver Says Walter Hill Has An “Extraordinary” Script Where Ripley Is “Incarcerated”

In 2020, “Alien” co-writers and franchise producers Walter Hill and the late David Giler had been trying to get the studio to bite on their treatment for “Alien 5” with Sigourney Weaver back as the iconic sci-fi heroine Ellen Ripley. Sadly, in 2022, Hill relayed that Disney wasn’t interested. Fast forward to now, while speaking to an audience at the New York Comic-Con (an “Alien” reunion panel hosted by Josh Horowitz), Weaver endorsed the material penned by Hill (she also mentioned getting a version from Hill in 2020 to Empire Magazine) and added having a meeting with the current studio brass at 20th Century Studios to express her interest in pursuing it by further developing the story into a fully formed script.

“Walter Hill is a very good friend of mine, and he wrote 50 pages of where Ripley would be now. And they are quite extraordinary. So, I don’t know if it’s gonna happen, but I have had a meeting with [20th Century Studios]…You know, I said, ‘I have never, except for Neill [Blomkamp], I’ve never felt the need. I was like, let her rest, let her recover.’ But what Walter has written is…very much about the society that would incarcerate someone who has tried to help mankind, but she’s a problem to them. So, she’s sort of tucked away. Anyway, I think it’s a very strong first 50 pages, and I’m thinking about, you know, working with Walter to see what the rest of the story would be. It would not be running around air shafts; it would be a very different kind of ‘Alien’ with a really good script. Scary, of course, the alien does show up. Inevitable.”

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Weaver adds, “I love what he’s done with the character. He really gets her strength and her anger and her humor, and it’s very hard to write.”

Basically, it could deal with how Weyland-Yutani, or whoever is left running things at the end of “Alien Resurrection” (set 200 years after the original movie) as Ripley is now a cloned human/xenomorph hybrid by a rogue faction in the military, and is potentially locked away in some medical facility or prison (harkening back to elements from “Resurrection” and David Fincher‘s “Alien 3” that was set on a prison planet).

We don’t know exactly if Hill’s 50-page treatment is brand new, reworked, or simply the older writings Hill was promoting in 2020 that he co-wrote with Giler. However, with Weaver putting her stamp of approval and pushing this to be completed into a full script, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine them pursuing a legacy sequel alongside the follow-up to “Alien: Romulus” and potentially more seasons of “Alien: Earth.”

“Sigourney, as she has from the very beginning, is being too modest about her proven ability to pull off the idea, which is to tell a story that scares the pants off your date, kicks the ass of a new Xenomorph, and conducts a meditation on both the universe of the Alien franchise and the destiny of the character of Lt. Ellen Ripley,” Hill told SyFy Wire back in 2020.

That all said, Weaver has a pretty strong working relationship these days with Disney that goes beyond their ownership of the “Alien” franchise, as she is one of the main cast members of Jon Favreau‘s upcoming “Star Wars” film, “The Mandalorian & Grogu” coming out next year, and is a supporting player in James Cameron‘s “Avatar” franchise with “Fire & Ash” hitting theaters in December.

We’ll have to be patient to see if we ultimately get “Alien 5” because this has been something teased for over 25 years, and two other iterations fizzled out in the development stage.

Sigourney Weaver is seriously considering returning playing Ripley! pic.twitter.com/xOT4TQEqye

— Hollywood Horror Museum (@horrormuseum) October 11, 2025