PROMETHEUS 2 is a go! But maybe not with the people you expected

There’s been a lot said about Prometheus around here – a lot – and most of what was said by me was that while I found director Ridley Scott’s long awaited 2012 return to sci-fi to be an uneven film with the dumbest smart people you’ll ever see, I had hopes for redemption from the planned sequel. A sequel that then seemed to just fizzle away a bit. Writers Damon Lindelof and Jon Spaihts spoke about it a few times, but there was never anything concrete.

Until now, that is, as Prometheus 2 has officially been given the go ahead. But things may just be slightly different behind the scenes.

We had already heard a while back how Damon Lindelof had taken himself out of contention to writing the sequel (probably because he didn’t want to take the blame again for yet another open ended movie), and now Variety is reporting that Fox and Ridley Scott have entered negotiations with screenwriter Jack Paglen to pen the sequel.

Paglen is a relative newcomer, only known for penning Transendence, Chris Nolan’s cinematographer, Wally Pfister’s directorial debut. So yeah, no pressure.

Now you may recall a report earlier in the year that Fox was “freaking out” about how to continue the story, something that Lindelof firmly called bullcrap on at the time, as he had already worked out quite a bit of the story with Scott and original scribe, Spaihts. In fact Scott had definitively said that one of the reasons Prometheus was so full of gaps in its mythology was because he had already planned to explore them in the follow-up films.

So now that follow-up film is finally happening with a writer in place to write it, and well, it looks like Scott might not be the one directing. While there’s very little doubt that Scott will be producing, Variety reports that he may not return to helm it due a bit of a scheduling conflict. Despite the mixed critical reception, Prometheus still made about $400 million on a $130 million budget, and Fox want to pounce on that as soon as possible now that its apparently ironed out all the kinks. But Scott is currently still in post-production on the Cormac McCarthy penned The Counsellor, and is planning to start developing his Moses epic, Exodus, later in the year, which should leave him out of action until late 2014. That may just be too long for Fox’s impatient bean counters.

BleedingCool actually made a really good suggestion that if Scott does indeed pass up on the director’s chair, Fox may actually already have a replacement on the Prometheus payroll in the form of Johnny Hardstaff, who despite his name, is not a porn actor, but rather the guy who made all these brilliant Prometheus viral videos.

Hardstaff may not be a big enough name for Fox though, as part of the initial attraction for Prometheus was to see Ridley Scott playing with some sci-fi toys again, nor have the proven skills with directing anything as large scale as Promethues, but at least he understands the tapestry of that universe.

Whoever does end up directing it, I just hope they get the ball rolling soon, just so that I can finally learn what odd couple Noomi Rapace and Michael “Robot head in a bag” Fassbender will be getting up to on their intergalactic road-trip.

Last Updated: June 18, 2013