For years, a sequel to District 9, the surprise sci-fi hit that spawned the careers of Sharlto Copley and Neill Blomkamp has been in the works.
With a tentative title of District 10, Blomkamp's last update came in May 2022, where he revealed that he was working on the script with Copley, and original District 9 screenwriter Terri Tatchell and that the sequel would be coming sooner, rather than later.
"I am still working on it… the answer is it’s within the near future," said Blomkamp.
Now, while on the press tour for his latest work, Gran Turismo, Blomkamp's response to a question regarding the status of District 10 seems to be a little less optimistic, at least regarding whether the film will happen anytime soon.
"Yeah, they would be tied to it," said Blomkamp on Sony Pictures being involved with District 10. "I don’t know if it’s getting made or not. I don’t know if I even want to make that right now, but at some point down the line, it’ll probably get made."
Blomkamp burst on the scene with 2009's District 9, a film set in 2010 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where an alien ship has been hovering above Earth for twenty-eight years. The aliens, known as 'prawns,' have been forced to reside in a filthy ghetto named District 9 while the human government figures out what to do with them.
The film stars Sharlto Copley as a low-level government agent responsible for coordinating the transportation of the prawns to a new camp. When he's exposed to an unknown chemical that begins to change his DNA, transforming him into a prawn himself, he becomes embroiled in a conflict between the prawns and the human government.
The film earned $210 million at the box office from a $30 million production budget and earned 4 Oscar nominations, including Best Motion Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. The industry was ready to anoint Blomkamp as the next great sci-fi auteur but in the years since, he's struggled to recapture that same magic.
His two sci-fi follow-ups, Elysium (2013) and Chappie (2015) received mixed and poor reviews from critics, respectively; and Blomkamp has now become more synonymous with stalled sci-fi projects after adaptations for Halo, The Gone World, Aliens, and RoboCop all fizzled out.
However, things appear to be getting back on track for Blomkamp as Gran Turismo debuted to strong audience scores and seems poised to turn a profit for Sony thanks to its modest production budget of $60 million.
Perhaps that will convince the studio to finally move forward with District 10. Fans of Blomkamp and Copley are certainly hoping that's the case.
From producer Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings Trilogy) and director Neill Blomkamp comes a startlingly original science fiction thriller that "soars on the imagination of its creators" (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone). With stunning special effects and gritty realism, the film plunges us into a world where the aliens have landed... only to be exiled to a slum on the fringes of Johannesburg. Now, one lone human discovers the mysterious secret of the extraterrestrial weapon technology. Hunted and hounded through the bizarre back alleys of an alien shantytown, he will discover what it means to be the ultimate outsider on your own planet.