There’ll be some time before the Prometheus movies fully tie in to the Alien mythology from which it grew, director Ridley Scott has claimed.

While promoting his new movie The Martian, Scott noted. “Prometheus has its own story to tell before it eventually ties into the movie that started it all…it won’t be in the next one. It will be in the one after this one or maybe even a fourth film before we get back into the Alien franchise…

“The whole point of it is to explain the Alien franchise and to explain the how and why of the creation of the Alien itself. I always thought of the Alien as a kind of piece of bacterial warfare. I always thought that that original ship, which I call the Croissant, was a battleship, holding these biomechanoid creatures that were all about destruction.”

Prometheus 2 is set to start filming in February; a proper fifth film in the Alien franchise is currently in preproduction. Titan Books’ literary version of the saga continues with Tim Lebbon’s The Rage War: Incursion, out in October.