It makes me ridiculously happy to report this. Ridley Scott is returning to the Alien franchise as director.
20th Century Fox has hired scribe Jon Spaihts to write a prequel to the 1979 film that Ridley Scott directed. The film tells the story of a commercial towing ship that responds to a distress signal from a nearby planet. They discover too late that the signal was coming from an empty ship was actually a warning.
There have been three sequels since the original Alien, and it was the pitch for an Alien reboot by Spaihts that got Scott interested in the project.
I cannot wait.