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At this stage it's just a rumour among the crew: Ridley Scott is not shooting just one moviebut three new Alien instalments in Australia from next month.
At a press conference announcing Alien: Covenant last   November, the veteran British director said he hoped to shoot three planned sequels to 2012's Prometheusin Sydney but it depended on the reception for the first one.
"If this is successful, it's already a nice flag to say let's do the next one there," he said.
The three movies would lead from Prometheus to what Scott called the "back entrance" of the original Alien and answer the question of who made the famous alien and why. 
The first instalment, Covenant, will show the crew of a colony ship discovering a dangerous world whose sole inhabitant is David, survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition. Michael Fassbender will return as both the android and a doppelganger.
While some crew members at Fox Studios are expecting to work on three movies, the official word is that is more "wishful thinking" than reality at this stage. Scott might be hoping to shoot three instalments, but only one is confirmed so far.
The plan is to shoot at Fox Studios and "outside" locations to create a green planet, with a cast that includes Katherine Waterston, Demian Bichir, Danny McBride, Carmen Ejogo and Billy Crudup.

Carriageworks' bold cinema plan
Carriageworks director Lisa Havilah. Photo: Dallas Kilponen
Could Sydney be finally getting a cinematheque - a centre for screening programs of classic and contemporary films and special events along the lines of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne or the National Film Theatre in London - after years of discussion?
The $50 million redevelopment plan for Carriageworks revealed by Fairfax's Andrew Taylor on Monday includes a 200-seat cinema.
It is part of the expansion of the cultural centre in the historic Eveleigh Rail Yards that includes a 5000-seat live music venue and a large public exhibition space under a six-year strategy that would turn it into a major cultural precinct attracting 2 million visitors a year.
Carriageworks director Lisa Havilah, who is seeking government funding as well as private investment to pay for the redevelopment, tells Short Cuts she is hoping to have two cinemas with 200 and 400 seats.
"We would hope they would be cinemas that would support the industry and industry development in NSW but also have an ongoing program for our audiences," she says. "That might be a curated program, it might be something that we work with Screen Australia or Screen NSW [on], it might be theme-based so it might support particular types of film festivals or existing events that are already happening in Sydney."
Havilah would love the cinemas to be a venue for the Sydney Film Festival as well as hosting exhibitions and a "cinematheque-type program" throughout the year.
"Carriageworks is located right in the heartland of the creative industries in Sydney and we really want to be supporting filmmakers and contemporary artists making screen-based works and really bringing new audiences to those works," she says.
The next stage is developing more detailed designs - renovating existing buildings rather than adding new ones - in consultation with the industry, government and the private sector.
"We hope to achieve it in the next three to six years," she says.
Proposals for a cinematheque in Sydney date back many years and include one proposal backed by George Miller for the Museum of Contemporary Art and another backed by Gillian Armstrong, Margaret Pomeranz, Sandra Levy and Clare Stewart that saw potential in Barangaroo.

Top of the Lake for Sydney
David Wenham and Elisabeth Moss in the first series of Top of the Lake.
With no fanfare, the second series of the acclaimed drama Top of the Lake is due to start shooting in Sydney next week.
Details are sketchy but Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss is returning as a detective in the Jane Campion and Gerald Lee-created series that shot in New Zealand the first time around.
Campion is believed to be returning as director and co-writer, with See-Saw Films' Emile Sherman and Iain Canning producing again.
"I've read three scripts so far and I'm incredibly excited where Jane is taking the story and the character," Moss told Deadline Hollywood at the Sundance Film Festival in   January.

Afghanistan film casts lead
One of the country's most adventurous coming films, Benjamin Gilmour's Afghanistan war drama Return to Kandahar, has taken a step closer to production by casting the central role.
Little-known Australian actor Sam Smith, who starred in the TV series pilot Hammer Bay and the short Some Static Started, will play a damaged former US Marine who goes back to Afghanistan to track down the family of an unarmed civilian he killed during a raid on a village.
Smith - not the Oscar-winning singer of the same name - is ready for what sounds like a filmmaking adventure and comfortable about the security precautions being taken for the shoot.
"I really like to watch films where you can see they haven't just rocked up to a studio and gone back to the hotel at 5pm," he says. "It's going to be really interesting to be immersed in a culture there. I've had that experience doing theatre before where I was performing out with Aboriginal communities where you have to be invited in."
Smith sees it as a dream role - a man seeking redemption - for an actor.
"There's a lot of scope to go how am I going to play that, what's true for me in those moments, and to really explore the full arc of that journey," he says.
Gilmour shot the 2008 drama Son of a Lion undercover in Pakistan's North West Frontier - avoiding the military and secret service - but is having to work above the radar with a bigger crew this time.
While he is keeping filming dates confidential for security reasons - and the crew and cast have a social media blackout - the shoot will be in Peshawar, Skardu and Gilgit in Pakistan then Kabul and Bamiyan in Afghanistan.
"In Bamiyan, we have the local governor's personal security detail escorting us," Gilmour says. "We're taking security very seriously."
While a crowdfunding campaign fell short, Gilmour believes he can shoot Return to Kandahar for less than $100,000 with increased investment from Pashtun philanthropist Asif Ullah Khan.
"I'm not only accustomed to working with very limited resources, it's a challenge I enjoy," he says.

Maggie Smith's van-tastic result
Maggie Smith stands her ground in The Lady in the Van. ???
There were two big new releases but The Lady In The Van, which was already screening, was the most popular movie in Australian cinemas last weekend.
The Maggie Smith comic drama took $1.6 million to reach $5.1 million on its second weekend, reaffirming the strength of the mature-age audience in cinemas.
Deadpool was second (another $1.6 million had it on the verge of breaking $40 million) closely followed by new movies Grimsby ($1.6 million) and 10 Cloverfield Lane ($1.4 million).
The continuing strength of Indian movies in certain areas was shown with two Punjabi films doing well.
Love Punjab, about a Canadian-Indian couple taking their troubled son to India to connect with his roots, opened with an impressive cinema average of $15,000 in taking $460,000. Ardass, about a city teacher who goes to work in a village school, did almost as well with a cinema average of $14,000 in taking $213,000.
Towards the end of its run, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has reached $93.7 million on its 13th weekend. It will be finish second on the all-time box office list behind Avatar's $115.6 million.

New movie for Abbie Cornish
Abbie Cornish has joined the solid cast for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the colourfully titled new movie from In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths director Martin McDonagh.
According to Deadline Hollywood, the Australian actress will join a movie that has Frances McDormand playing a woman who is so furious that police have not caught her daughter's killer that she buys three billboards to goad Woody Harrelson's sheriff into action.
Cornish, whose coming movies include the Iranian Embassy in London siege movie 6 Days opposite Mark Strong and Jamie Bell and the sci-fi thriller Geostorm opposite Gerard Butler, will play the sheriff's wife as she re-teams with McDonagh after Seven Psychopaths.

Hewison's pop-up plans for ACMI
As the new head of film programs at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, James Hewison will first look at what has and has not been working at the Federation Square institution when he starts the job next month.
But the former executive director of the Melbourne International Film Festival and chief executive of the Australian Film Institute, who comes to ACMI after distribution roles at Madman Entertainment and Curious, already has some ideas that include taking films out of traditional cinemas more often.
"There are opportunities increasingly in a landscape where exhibition everywhere but most particularly in Australia is changing at a fairly rapid rate," Hewison tells Short Cuts. "If you look to some of the nationality-based film festivals, such as the French Film Festival which is on at the moment, I think there's increasingly an opportunity for the idea of a cinema club.
"There's definitely a movement, certainly in Melbourne, for those kinds of events, like pop-up cinemas and cinemas in fairly unorthodox spaces, to do some really interesting things ... as well as screening films that are now increasingly difficult to find outside of digital platforms."
Hewison also wants ACMI to push more into supporting emerging Australian filmmakers and exposing them to the best in world cinema.
"That's older films as well as newer work by first-time filmmakers," he says. "I really plan for ACMI to be very much a home for a lot more activity with the film industry and obviously more with audiences."
Announcing Hewison's appointment, ACMI chief executive Katrina Sedgwick called him "one of the best film programmers around" with "a bold curatorial vision."
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