AceShowbiz -

The future of the new "Alien" franchise looks bleak. Ridley Scott had been talking about making a follow-up to "Alien: Covenant", but following the lukewarm responses to the "Prometheus" sequel, the planned new "Alien" movie may have been scrapped.

A source claiming to have worked on "Covenant" recently revealed on Blu-ray.com's forum that the next movie was originally scheduled to start pre-production this month, but it's now canceled. Making it worse, a warehouse storage unit full of the movie's props was recently auctioned off.

"The sequel to 'Covenant' was originally due to start pre-production this month in Sydney," the source said. "After the box office results filming was canceled, and a warehouse storage unit full of stuff was auctioned off a few months ago. So the original plan of pumping out another quickly has definitely changed with no immediate plans for anything."

As the authenticity of the source cannot be confirmed, this report should be taken with a grain of salt. However, it wouldn't be a surprise if Fox canceled the plans for the "Alien: Covenant" sequel, since the latest movie didn't receive much love from critics and moviegoers. Most people could not connect with the disjointed mix of the old-school "Alien" formula and the themes of religion, creation and other stuff that had little to do with elemental outer space action.

Director Ridley Scott said back in May that the "Covenant" sequel, reportedly titled "Awakening", would begin filming within 14 months. "We're writing [a sequel] now, as we speak. I'll be filming that within 14 months," he told IGN at the time.

"Covenant" is set years after "Prometheus" and follows the crew of the colony ship Covenant who discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world. There they find the android David (Michael Fassbender), who has wiped out the Engineers and taken over experimenting with their life-form altering black goo.