"Lost" writer taking over for Ridley Scott's "Alien" prequel!

What's the status of Ridley Scott's "Alien" prequels in 3D? Well, other than being two separate films, aiming to shoot in stereoscopic photography and apparently hoping to out-"nasty" James Cameron's "Aliens," not much.

At least not recently. While Scott has said the script was in development, Deadline is now reporting that "Lost" writer and "Star Trek," "Cowboys & Aliens" c0-writer, Damon Lindelof has been hired by Fox to rewrite Scott's gestating prequel which can only mean the current version (by Jon Spaihts, who was one of our five screenwriters to watch) isn't quite up to snuff (even though that draft was evidently good enough to convince Scott to finally come back to this franchise).

Furthering the point, Deadline report says that the Lindelof/Scott meeting, "sparked a take that could well turn out to be a free-standing science fiction film" which suggests a whole new direction. Does that mean it could have nothing to do with everyone's favorite acid-blooded Xenomorph? Hard to tell, but Fox's hopes that "Alien" will be Scott's next picture is diminishing.

Scott likes to work fast and bang out a film every year or two and it sounds like with Lindelof on board they might be going back to the drawing board. Scott also has, as usual, myriad options at his disposal as the filmmaker always has about a dozen film projects in various states of ready.

Of the projects that Scott has at hand, Deadline also mentions "Gucci" which has Angelina Jolie attached (and possibly Leonardo DiCaprio) to star and that's a possible one as its development has been popping up in the pages of Production Weekly of late and it sounds like its in active development. At the "Paul" junket in San Diego for Greg Mottola's upcoming sci-fi film, Sigourney Weaver told us that she'd have no involvement in Scott's "Alien" prequel, but we all pretty much assumed as much. Most recently, Scott's name came up in connection with "The Wolf Of Wall Street," an old Marty Scorsese project that was supposed to star his young muse, DiCaprio.