Last October, much was made of Ridley Scott, the director of 1979’sAlien, seeing an early cut of the new Alien franchise entryAlien: Romulus, which will be released on August 12, 2025.Alien: Romuluswriter/director Fede Álvarezreportedthat Scott told him that the film was “fucking great,” despite the fact that “he’s really tough, particularly if it has something to do with his movies.” Case in point are his disparaging comments aboutBlade Runner 2049, the sequel to hisBlade Runner.
Scott’s appreciation for Álvarez’s film may have something to do with the fact that it will be set between the originalAlienand 1986’sAliens, thus relying only onAlien,Prometheus, andAlien: Covenant– the three films in the franchise directed by Scott – for backstory. Scott has long resented films that add toAlien’s original lore – and that goes back to his reaction to the film’s first sequel,Aliens.
The snub that took the franchise away from Scott
Instead of bringing Scott back to direct the sequel to his massive sci-fi hit, 20thCentury Fox sought out young filmmaker James Cameron (hot offThe Terminator) to both write and direct. (Scott was poison at the time, asBlade Runner, released in 1982, had garnered baffled reviews and lost money.) In a 2023 interview, Scottsaidthat Cameron himself was the one to tell him that he was replacing Scott, via a phone call. Scott recalls being “pissed” and “deeply hurt,” saying that he had believed the firstAlienshould have been “a one-off.”
As it turned out, Cameron’s approach to the material wasdrastically differentthan Scott’s had been. Abandoning the intimate, spine-tingling body horror of the 1979 film,Aliensis a gung-ho action movie. As Scott put it, “I’m not a superhero fan … Everything gets less and less real … I think Sigourney Weaver’s a superhero inAliens.”
Scott evens the score with Prometheus and Covenant
It’s no surprise, then, that when Scott regained control of the franchise with his 2012 prequelPrometheus, he quickly retconned most of the lore that had been developed by the fiveAliensequels released up to that time. Perhaps most relevantly, he eliminated the “alien queen,” a supercharged version of the franchise’s xenomorphs who births the standard-issue aliens and the big bad/final boss in Cameron’s film.
InPrometheusand its 2017 sequelAlien: Covenant(also directed by Scott), we learn that the xenomorphs were created by a rogue AI (Michael Fassbender) experimenting with new life forms, and that no queen comes into play.
Scott’s no fan of any of the film’s sequels,sayingin 2019 that “Alien vs. Predatorwas a daft idea.” (It’s hard to argue with that assessment.) Generally speaking, though, he insists, “Fundamentally, you can’t” do a sequel toAlien. His resentment of the very idea surely began withAliens, as a franchise that should have always been his — if it existed at all — was snatched away, and an idea he helped develop began to evolve in a very different direction.
Alienis streaming onHulu.Aliensis also available to stream, but to honor Ridley Scott’s distaste for it, we will not tell you how to watch it in this article.
