'Alien: Paradise Lost' Will Introduce New Explorers To Get Mercilessly Slaughtered In Space

No one in the universe wants a sequel to Prometheus more than director Ridley Scott, who has been talking about a follow-up to his Alien prequel ever since it left audiences baffled and divided three years ago. Now titled Alien: Paradise Lost, the film that once was Prometheus 2 has charted a course for an early 2016 start date and Scott has been slowly spilling plot details to anyone who will listen. The latest news: the survivors of the first film will be joined by a new crew of characters. After all, what good is an Alien movie without a body count?

Everything we know about this so far can be found after the jump.

Speaking with Gregory Ellwood at Awards Campaign, Scott revealed that Noomi Rapace's Elizabeth and Michael Fassbender's David will not be alone on their quest to track down the mysterious Engineers. After all, a movie about a dangerous space voyage where 50% of your cast is literally a severed head doesn't sound like much fun. Anyway, our intrepid space travelers will apparently encounter a new group of people along the way:

"It's going to be it's own separate thing because they are going to the planet of the Engineers and they are going to see what happened there. It was a disaster. And they will be in that alien craft that takes them there, but with a new group that's incoming, a new group of travelers in the beginning of the first act."

So put on your prediction caps, Alien fans. Who could this new "group of travelers" represent? If the movie wanted to make a cheeky reference to the original franchise, they would be a crew of space marines, possibly even a rescue party. They could be rival scientists, exploring the same turf as Dr. Shaw and her late, crushed/blown-up/ripped-to-shreds brethren. Maybe they'll be space truckers, totally average folks who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. In any case, most of them will probably become fodder for an angry Xenomorph at some point.

With The Martian going over like gangbusters with critics and audiences, Scott has been using his new supply of goodwill talk about Alien: Paradise Lost without sounding like a total crazy person. Prometheus was a mixed bag – a gorgeous, technically jaw-dropping, dumb-as-a-pile-of-moon-rocks mixed bag – so everyone was rightfully skeptical when he started going on about Prometheus 3 and Prometheus 4. Still, The Martian is Scott's best movie in years, maybe even decades. If he wants to ride this high into another Alien movie, bless his heart. We'll follow him down this rabbit hole.

The most interesting aspect of this whole movie remains the film's title change. Prometheus was always intended to be a prequel to the Alien series, but it was supposed to be an indirect prequel. It was going to take its time building those connections and exploring a larger. By actually putting Alien in the title of this thing, Scott (and 20th Century Fox) are no longer beating around the bush. Maybe they crunched the numbers and realized that real people are more interested in an Alien movie than a Prometheus sequel. The fact that normal people (i.e., people who don't obsessively read movie blogs) don't necessarily realize that those are the same thing represents a real problem.

Alien: Paradise Lost is still set for a May 30, 2017 release date.