Ridley Scott, now 88, is still sketching storyboards for the next picture before the current one has even settled into theaters. According to a fresh Los Angeles Times conversation, the British director is mapping an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" while his post-pandemic survival film "The Dog Stars" opens in cinemas this week — proof, as ever, that his restless eye has not dimmed.
A quieter apocalypse
The Dog Stars, drawn from Peter Heller's 2012 novel, drops us into the high-altitude quiet of Colorado a decade after an aggressive flu has hollowed out the population. Jacob Elordi's Hig, his dog Jasper, and Josh Brolin's Bangley form a wary ménage at an isolated airstrip, foraging supplies by old Cessna and trading uneasy truces with a Mennonite community led by Benedict Wong. The premise suggests standard dystopian sprawl, but Scott's visual grammar — that instinct he sharpened in the back alleys of British advertising, then refined through the iconic Apple Macintosh "1984" spot — keeps the world tactile, inhabited, mournful rather than bombastic. Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce arrive as catalysts, the human connection that might pull Hig beyond survival toward something resembling hope.
Speaking from his home in the French countryside — a base of operations that mirrors a wider expatriate drift toward France, where student visa costs and insurance updates for English-speakers have become their own ongoing story — Scott retains the sheepish look of a kid caught not paying attention in class. He doodles through Zoom calls. He holds up his "Ridleygrams," as the scrawled storyboards are known around Hollywood. He is, in his own words, "just always working on this."
The pipeline keeps swelling
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Scott confirmed that the long-rumored sequel to 2017's Alien: Covenant is still moving forward, centered on Michael Fassbender's David and what Scott described as the android creating a "brave new world for himself." He framed his fascination with characteristic bluntness: "AIs can go off. And if they do, it's like a bomb." That project now shares a corridor at 20th Century Studios with a sequel to 2024's Alien: Romulus, and observers have begun wondering whether both films' cliffhanger threads might braid into a single narrative release.
On Blade Runner, Scott was characteristically candid. He holds an executive producer credit on Prime Video's Blade Runner 2099 limited series (arriving Nov. 25) but admits he is not creatively involved. "I can't blame my lawyers and my agents at that time, but somehow we let [the rights to the] Blade Runner [franchise] go," he said. "And when you're not the author of the actual written word, you don't have a piece." He did, however, lavish unexpected praise on Noah Hawley's Alien: Earth TV series — "pretty damn good," which from Scott is no small thing — and offered a measured concession on AI in filmmaking: he does not use the technology himself, but, he said, "it's coming, inevitably."
What to watch
The Dog Stars is, beneath its quiet surface, a thesis about connection in collapsed worlds — a thread Scott has been pulling since Alien's corridors and the rain-slicked Los Angeles of Blade Runner. Whether audiences receive its subdued register is the immediate question, and The Hollywood Reporter's first reactions suggest a film less maximalist than the director's recent run. Beyond the opening weekend, the more consequential industry story is how 20th Century balances a Covenant sequel against a Romulus follow-up, two cliffhangers tugging at the same franchise weave. And somewhere on a storyboard in the French countryside, Treasure Island waits for its turn.