With Alien: Covenant set to be released in 2017, it was recently revealed that Neill Blomkamp’s Alien 5 has been put on hold. It’s an understandable decision, especially as an Alien prequel and sequel (set four movies later) being released within a year or two of each other could have caused some serious confusion. However, Alien 5 has not been scrapped.

With that in mind, it’s still easy to get excited about the Chappie helmer’s plans for the movie, especially now that Michael Biehn has spilled the beans on the direction it will take.

“They’re planning on bringing me and Newt back, and at this point Newt will be around twenty-seven years old,” the actor who played colonial marine Cpl. Dwayne Hicks in Aliens revealed. “I know that every actress in Hollywood is going to want to play this one, it’s really a passing of the torch between Sigourney and this younger actress who would play Newt.”

He then went on to confirm that Alien 5 will indeed do away with the critically panned third and fourth instalments of the franchise. “The basic idea is acting like Alien 3 and 4 never existed, so if you go on Neill Blomkamp’s site everyone can see all of the artwork for that.”

“I know Ridley Scott is doing his movie first and is going to be the executive producer on this one, so I’m really looking forward to that,” he added when asked about Alien 5’s status. “I know that Ridley’s focus is on the second ‘Prometheus’ and I’m sure that he and Fox both don’t want that and Neill’s movie to come out right next to each other, because they’re kind of two different worlds, with ‘Aliens’ taking place thousands of years later, which is how they explained it all to me, but at the same time, they want to give them a similar feel. I know they’re putting the brakes on Neill’s movie just for a little while, but I really think that it would be embarrassing to Ridley and Fox and Sigourney if they just didn’t make the movie.”

With any luck, we’ll hear something a little more solid on plans for Alien 5 very soon…