Despite saying that the franchise has "almost run out", Ridley Scott has confirmed that a sequel to Alien: Covenant is coming – and re-affirmed that he wants to "drift away" from focus on aliens.

The movie series has literally made its name on killer aliens that burst from people's chests, though the director has hinted that the movies will focus more on AI in the future in order to ensure its survival.

"We are [going to make another], we are," Scott confirmed to Entertainment Weekly of the next movie in the franchise, following the release of Covenant earlier this year.

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"I think what we have to do is gradually drift away from the alien stuff," he added. "People say, 'You need more alien, you need more face pulling, need more chest bursting,' so I put a lot of that in Covenant and it fitted nicely.

"But I think if you go again you need to start finding another solution that's more interesting. I think AI is becoming much more dangerous and therefore more interesting."

Referring to androids David and Walter from Covenant, as well as numerous other movie AIs, the director continued: "Fassbender was an AI; Ian Holm [from] was an AI; Roy Batty [from] was an AI; so was Rachael [from]."

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He also went on to cite a recent Facebook experiment that saw two AIs shut down after they learned how to communicated with each other in their own language as a reason why AI is becoming dangerous.

"They put two AIs together and they were communing," he said. "It already invented a f**king language!

"And they couldn't decipher what the language was so they had to switch them off. What was said and where's it gone? They could have already implemented something we don't know."

Covenant was not quite the box office success of its predecessor Prometheus, though Scott has already got at least two more movies planned – and going by his renewed focus on AI, we will likely see plenty more of David too.

Alien: Covenant is available to buy on Blu-ray and DVD now.

From: Digital Spy