These last few years, Neil Blomkamp has had a lot of his passion projects fall apart, including ‘Alien 4, “District 10,” “RoboCop” and “Halo.”
With that said, Blomkamp has set up his next film over at Sony. He is set to direct “Alpha,” starring Aaron Paul, and it sounds like the perfect vehicle for Blomkamp.
“Alpha” tackles a government approved experiment on a death row inmate gone awry. They’ve turned him into apex predator and Paul’s FBI agent has been assigned to track him down.
Blomkamp is an interesting filmmaker, with his own unique vision. It’s been a tough road for him ever since breaking out with 2009’s “District 9”. Blomkamp’s follow-up was 2013’s “Elysium,” which proved to be very divisive, his third film 2015’s “Chappie” was outright panned, and few saw his 2021 sci-fi indie “Demonic.”
I should mention that there are definitely some major “Chappie” fans out there. I’ve spoken to quite a few of them. They exist.
Last year’s “Gran Turismo” turned out to be a decent hit for Sony, garnering positive reviews and raking in $122M at the box-office. This was the lifeline Blomkamp needed, especially after a string of commercial failures. More importantly, audiences loved “Gran Turismo” with its A CinemaScore, 90% PostTrak, 98% RT user rating and 7.1 IMDb score.
More recently, Blomkamp has been trying to revive “District 10,” to the point where he admitted that its existence would most likely depend on the success of “Gran Turismo,” which ended up doing fairly well. I presume if “Alpha” is well received then he might finally get a green light on “District 10.”
The source material, for the uninitiated, is Arrowhead Game Studios' co-op shooter — muscle in power armor defending "Super Earth" from bugs and robots in a war game.