It’s been a long and rocky road to get to Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, the seventh film (ninth if you count the Alien vs. Predator entries) in one of the most influential sci-fi franchises in entertainment history. As with any series that has been around for almost half a century, there are more movies that didn’t happen than ones that actually made it to the big screen. Imagine the alternate timeline in which Aliens director James Cameron returned to the franchise, Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon wrote the fifth movie, or Prometheus’s Michael Fassbender was allowed to play David again. Some of these were just ideas, but others got remarkably close to chestbursting from the Hollywood blockbuster machine. Here are eight of the most interesting failed attempts at expanding the universe spawned from Ridley Scott’s Alien. (Note: We’re excluding the director’s cuts and workprints of existing films that have been released in some form because, well, they technically do exist even if they sometimes hint at alternate directions the franchise could have gone if they were theatrically released.)
The One That Put Ripley to Sleep
When producers David Giler, Walter Hill, and Gordon Carroll started to plan the inevitable sequel to the massively successful Aliens in 1987, they went in an unexpected direction: almost entirely sidelining Ripley, who lay in a coma for most of their story, in favor of making Michael Biehn’s Hicks into the protagonist. Naturally, taking an Oscar-nominated performance and putting it in the backseat for a movie didn’t go over well with 20th Century Fox, but Weaver reportedly agreed to the shift in focus with a plan to take the lead again in a fourth film that would be shot simultaneously. Giler and Hill turned to a legend to write the script: William Gibson, the cyberpunk novelist who was riding high on the success of 1984’s Neuromancer.
Gibson’s script is widely available online and was even adapted into a book and a five-part Dark Horse comics series. It at first emphasizes the corporate machinations of Weyland-Yutani, still trying to turn the alien into an interstellar weapon, before exploding into action in the back half. Notably, it featured the creation of a new alien-human hybrid that would have radically altered this franchise; it could be created via an airborne contagion before essentially hiding in human form, a la John Carpenter’s The Thing. Gibson’s script does make Hicks into more of a lead, and also returns Newt and a repaired Bishop to major roles.
The Unfilmable ‘Piece of Junk’
Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin was hired to direct Gibson’s Alien 3, but the project began to collapse when Gibson was asked to do rewrites with Harlin that would combine the studio’s desire for more action with the author’s original vision. A stalemate followed and Gibson left, citing “foot dragging on the producers’ part.” In his absence, Harlin suggested screenwriter Eric Red (Near Dark) to handle the revisions. He reportedly delivered a script that radically changed Gibson’s vision, including no characters from the first two films — not even Ripley — in a new story about a soldier named Sam Smith on a planet that reportedly looked like Middle America. Even Red would eventually call his script a “piece of junk.” It was such a shift from Hill and Giler’s original idea that it ended up sinking the nascent movie and sending Fox back to the drawing board.
The studio hired David Twohy to write a fresh script — he delivered yet another one with no Ripley at all, this time set on a prison planet. It was also deemed unfilmable. Harlin decided to move on, and director Vincent Ward then enlisted a writer named John Fasano to hash out a radically different Alien 3 that unfolded on some sort of space monastery on a satellite made almost entirely of wood — imagine the visual potential of a creature clambering up wooden structures. Ward and Fasano’s script would become the template for the eventual Alien 3, killing Hicks off between movies and centering issues of faith. Ward and Fasano quit the project when the studio pushed up the release date so much that they felt their vision couldn’t be completed, which forced Hill and Giler to take Ward/Fasano’s structure, ditch the wood for the prison setting of Twohy’s vision, and hand it off to a young music video director named David Fincher.
The Joss Whedon Script That Sigourney Weaver Hated
“You know, Fox was going to do another one. They had it written. Joss Whedon wrote it.” So said Sigourney Weaver to MTV back in 2009, revealing that she was up for the task of returning to the role of Ripley after the fourth film in the Alien series, Alien: Resurrection, but she didn’t like Whedon’s script (which reportedly took place entirely on Earth). With the star now disinterested and rumors of an upcoming Alien vs. Predator movie — egged on by a shot of an alien skull in 1990’s Predator 2 — the series officially left Ripley behind. What might have been? Whedon worked on Resurrection (he ended up hating the final product, calling it a “shitty Alien movie with my name on it”) which ends with a Ripley clone and the android Call (Winona Ryder) freshly landed on the blue planet. It sounds like Whedon’s script continued that arc, picking up immediately after the end of Resurrection, and closing the arc for Ripley at home after 250 years in space. The problem? Weaver hated it, and she had final approval.
The James Cameron and Ridley Scott Team-Up
After the failure of Alien: Resurrection and the death of Whedon’s version, the franchise could have gone in a dozen different directions. One of them would have welcomed back the two directors who made it such a massive success in the first place. Cameron told Ain’t It Cool News in 2006, “Ridley and I talked about doing another Alien film and I said to 20th Century Fox that I would develop a fifth Alien film.” Around the same time, Scott told The Chicago Sun-Times that he was “seriously mulling it over. I think it would be a lot of fun, but the most important thing is to get the story right.” While all that mulling eventually led to Scott’s return to the franchise with Prometheus, Cameron never came back. The way he tells it, when he discovered that 20th Century Fox was moving forward with Alien vs. Predator, he jumped ship. “To me, that was Frankenstein Meets Werewolf,” he told AICN. “It was Universal just taking their assets and starting to play them off against each other.” Cameron revealed in that same interview that he actually liked the spin-offs once he got around to seeing them. Scott, on the other hand, told Empire while promoting Prometheus that he’d still never seen the spin-offs.
The Weyland-Yutani Backstory No One Asked For
The franchise’s side quest into the world of Alien vs. Predator ended with the miserable Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, a truly atrocious film with a 12 percent on Rotten Tomatoes but a sizable enough international haul at the box office (north of $130 million) that it’s surprising it ended the series. Of course, it almost didn’t. The Brothers Strause, who directed Requiem, were reportedly talking up a third film in the AvP series during post-production of the second, and hinted that the new sequel would take place aboard a spacecraft, like most movies in the main Alien series do. In an interview with io9 in 2010, Greg and Colin Strause said that their plan for AvP3 would have served as a bridge to the action of Alien by suggesting that the Predator gun given to Ms. Yutani (Françoise Yip) at the end of the second AvP film led to the rise of the villainous Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
Years later, in 2018, Liam O’Donnell, the director of Skylines, revealed on X that he wrote a separate treatment for AvP3 that was set in South Africa, where global warming had led to the release of the Xenomorph Queen from the first AvP movie. He admitted it was a mess, but the promise of a film that ends with a “three way fight between One Predator, One Alien, and One Human” is pretty enticing. Newer Predator films have continued hinting at a potential (maybe even inevitable) third AvP film — there’s a shot of an Alien skull in 2010’s Predators and an alternate ending to 2018’s The Predator that features an Alien Facehugger apparatus created by Weyland-Yutani. Alex Litvak, the co-writer of Predators, revealed as recently as 2020 that the once-planned sequel to that film was going to include the Colonial Marines from Aliens.
Neill Blomkamp’s Tantalizing Visions
The most exciting idea yet for a post-Resurrection movie surfaced in the mid-2010s, thanks to District 9 helmer Neill Blomkamp. Reportedly titled Alien: Awakening at one point, the film was going to take place after Aliens and reunite Ripley, Hicks and Newt, operating as if the third and fourth Alien films never happened. The story goes that Blomkamp is such a fan of the Alien series that he began creating his own concept art, playing in a world that he loved like a fan as much as a professional. When he shared some of that concept art — which featured cool imagery like Ripley in a mech alien suit, a room full of alien eggs, and a deeply-scarred Hicks — it appeared for a moment like this version might actually get off the ground. Weaver was on board. She told Coming Soon, “He kept sending me these brilliant designs and ideas and everything. We’ll see what happens.” She wasn’t alone in her enthusiasm. Even after Fox committed resources back to Scott’s prequel Alien: Covenant, leaving Blomkamp’s vision seemingly dead, James Cameron kept hinting that it was not. “I’m working on that,” he told reporters who asked about Blomkamp’s version during a red carpet. Alas, the final flicker of hope for this movie went out when Fox and Disney merged.
The Ending Ripley Deserved
There was a brief window when it looked like one of the founders of the Alien franchise was going to give Ripley the ending she deserved. Walter Hill, who produced the original films, delivered a 50-page treatment to Sigourney Weaver in the late 2010s. Co-writer (and another original producer) David Giler told SyFy Wire that the script, which would have been set sometime after Alien: Resurrection, “conducts a meditation on both the universe of the Alien franchise and the destiny of the character of Lt. Ellen Ripley.” One wonders if Hill himself might have helmed the comeback venture. What killed this potential return of people who understood Alien as well as anyone? Commerce, again. The merger between Disney and Fox in 2022 reportedly ended the Hill version as the studios pivoted to Romulus. It must be said, however, that the action of Romulus takes place between Alien and Aliens, which leaves the possibility of a post-Resurrection story wide open. So Hill’s treatment for Alien 5 may not stay dead forever. Maybe it could at least get a comic book like Gibson’s? Fans would love to read it.
Ridley Scott’s Unfinished Trilogy
Is Ridley done with this world? He may be in his 80s now, but Scott shows no signs of slowing down; he’s returning to Gladiator later this year and producing FX on Hulu’s Alien: Earth, a reboot series premiering in 2025 from Fargo creator Noah Hawley. Might we get a sequel to Alien: Covenant too? Scott said before that film’s release that he had plans for two more prequels … and we’ve only seen one. Reports circulated in the late 2010s that Scott had a film in production with a script from Skyfall writer John Logan that was to be called Alien: Awakening (yes, just like the canceled Blomkamp project). An Alien-centric issue of Empire suggested that Logan’s script continued the story of Michael Fassbender’s David battling the Engineers and might have finally connected more dots between this series and the original film. In 2019, Variety reported that a third Scott prequel film was in the script phase and that he would return to direct it. But, again, the Disney-Fox merger seems to have stopped all traction on this series. At least for now. After all, these aliens are hard to kill.
