The movie sequel Ridley Scott called a “daft idea”
Crossovers can often feel like an act of desperation used to try and resurrect two failing franchises in one fell swoop, something that wasn’t lost on Ridley Scott when he saw a property he’d steered to iconic status become a shadow of its former self.
For a hot minute, it looked as though Alien had the potential to go down as an all-timer of an IP, especially when James Cameron followed up Scott’s stone-cold classic with one of his own. However, the law of diminishing returns inevitably set in, rendering the sci-fi saga obsolete by the end of the 1990s.
Concurrently, the Predator series had proven popular across its opening two instalments, but found itself lodged in development hell around the same time after any plans for a third entry repeatedly failed to gain any traction. Having already cross-pollinated in comic books and video games, Hollywood opted to kill two birds with one stone.
The end result was Paul W.S. Anderson’s anaemic 2004 effort Alien vs. Predator, which watered down both of its iconic extra-terrestrials in order to secure a PG-13 rating. While it did turn a tidy profit at the box office, it was comfortably the worst film that either of the titular creatures had appeared in up until that point, with the crossover sequel Requiem marking the inarguable nadir for both.
In the 1990s, James Cameron was developing an Alien project that would have seen him partner with Scott to unite the all-stars of the glory days, but it never came to fruition. Instead, 20th Century Fox wanted the equivalent of a kid smashing their action figures together to make the most of two marketable brands, leaving the original’s director less than thrilled.
“You get to the point when you say, ‘Okay, it’s dead in the water’. I think Alien vs. Predator was a daft idea,” he said to The Hollywood Reporter. “And I’m not sure it did very well or not, I don’t know. But it somehow brought down the beast.” That being said, the film’s perceived failure did encourage Scott to make a comeback.
“And I said to them, ‘Listen, you can resurrect this, but we have to go back to scratch and go to a prequel, if you like,'” he continued. “So we go to Prometheus, which was not bad actually.” Ironically, Scott’s return to Alien ended up killing off Neill Blomkamp’s plans for a direct sequel to Cameron’s Aliens with Sigourney Weaver and Michael Biehn, while his follow-up Covenant didn’t end up giving rise to the third chapter in its planned trilogy.
Instead, because any self-respecting franchise is never allowed to truly disappear, both Alien and Predator are back with fresh new coats of paint. Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey has sequel Badlands in the works, while Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus is set for an August 2024 release, with Noah Hawley also working on an episodic TV series. Hopefully, the two rivals will be kept at arm’s length after what happened last time.
