Why Disney Abandoned the ‘Alien’ Prequel Trilogy

When it was announced that Ridley Scott would finally be returning to the Alien franchise, fans lost their minds in anticipation. However, the realities of what was eventually made proved to be a bit more divisive. With two films of a proposed trilogy being produced before bottoming out, this begs the question, what exactly killed the Alien prequel trilogy? No one ever asked the obvious question, who would make such a creature as an alien, and why would they design it? Released in 1979, Ridley Scott's iconic sci-fi horror film Alien turned the genre on its head. This truckers-in-space film is looked back on as a massive achievement. Originally designed to be a low-budget exploitation film, the finished product is better than anyone could have hoped for. When Scott and co-screenwriter Dan O'Bannon brought some of the best artists and designers in the industry on board the project, it quickly evolved into something else. And audiences responded in kind. The film made $118 million opening weekend, which was an almost unprecedented level of success. The success of Alien would launch a franchise of three direct sequels, two Alien vs. Predator spinoff films, and countless toys, video games, and comic books. And so by the mid-2000s, the franchise had entered a dormant period. So inevitably, the talk of more Alien films resurfaced. Alien 5, AVP3, and a few other would-be projects were discussed before the powers-that-be landed on exploring the backstory of the space jockey in a prequel to the original film. Scott, having been brought on as a producer, initially selected Carl Eric Rinch to guide the reinvestigation of the xenomorph. Fox was not pleased with this decision. They gave him an ultimatum. Either he directed, or the project was dead. Scott chose to return to the director's chair. From there, he brought in Doctor Strange and Passenger screenwriter John Spates to write a draft on what was, at the time, called Alien Engineers. This script featured many of the elements that ended up in the finished film, David, the space jockey actually being humanoid, and a cast of scientists going to a planet with a crashed alien ship on it. However, at the end of the day, this version was much more of a standard prequel to Alien. During the development process, Scott changed his mind and decided that the project should be more of a standalone story, not as closely tied to the existing Alien franchise. This is when Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof was hired to redevelop the project with a bit more of an avant-garde take on franchise building. Tell a story about the origins of life within the alien world, but don't actually feature the titular alien. This was a risky and lofty goal, maybe too lofty. There's one question no one asked in all four movies, much to my amazement and surprise, no one said, who's the big guy in the seat that became known as the space jockey? In the finished film, we follow a crew of deep space explorers who discover a star map and decide to track it to the ends of space, hoping to discover life outside of our own. However, what they do uncover is a nightmare beyond their wildest imagination. The film deals with themes of resentment towards a creator, the inability of humanity to understand our purpose, and the natural evolution of species being a dangerous and threatening process. If these things made us, then surely they could save us. While some viewers found the meditation of the cyclical nature of life and death a compelling backdrop for a film, many walked away with questions about the incongruity of scenes or the basic logic of characters. Take, for instance, how this biologist guy is freaked out at the idea of alien life one moment... Whatever that probe is picking up, it's not dead. It's reading life form. Okay, what do you mean a life form? ...and then tries to make friends with a space snake the next. Hey, baby. Or how David is instructed by Waylon, through his dreams, to... Try harder. ...and he interprets that as choosing to expose Holloway to the Black Ooze. Or even just the simple question of, why was Guy Pearce in old man makeup the whole time? Are there literal answers to all these questions? Yes. Most of them revolving around deleted scenes that were cut from the finished runtime. But that's not the point, really. It all boils down to the fact that the film is a flawed masterpiece. If you squint, you can see what Scott was going for. An ambitious epic, a sweeping science fiction tale created utilizing the scaffolding of an existing franchise, but completely reimagining it from the ground up. Regrettably, Scott's reach exceeded his grasp. The film was not received with the universal praise Fox was hoping for. While it was a financial success, pulling in $403 million, it didn't quite cement itself as a cultural touchstone. If you created me, who created you? The question of the ages. Scott initially said that the Prometheus sequel would follow David and Shaw in their attempt to reach the Engineer homeworld, yet it became clear fairly quickly that Fox was going to make Scott recalibrate some things, if they were going to move forward. How? By bringing back the Xenomorph. Either kill them outright, or use them as incubators to spawn a hybrid form. Highly aggressive. Initially titled Alien Paradise Lost, the sequel to Prometheus was announced on August 1, 2012. At that point, both Fassbender and Noomi Rapace were said to be reprising their roles. However, when the eventual sequel did manifest, now titled Alien Covenant, it had been significantly altered. Shaw didn't die in the crash. No. What did you do to her? Exactly what I'm going to do to you. Gone was the Shaw and David seeking the true nature of the Engineer's plotline, and instead, we follow a group of deep space settlers who have encountered a distress beacon and become sucked up into David's machinations as a mad scientist tinkering with the new ways of creating life on the Engineer's former homeworld. It's almost a sci-fi version of Apocalypse Now, but with two Fassbenders. You were meant to be dead. There have been a few updates since your day. Covenant's deviation from the threads of Prometheus feels like something of a mixed bag. You can feel in the film that Scott wants to make a movie that evolves the themes of a creation destroying its creator, and Fox wants a movie where a xenomorph hunts people. Tragically, Covenant's mix of schlocky kills and David as a Frankenstein-esque doctor didn't exactly work out all that well. The film pulled in roughly $240 million worldwide, not exactly a resounding endorsement that would have silenced Scott's internal critics at Fox. The man ostensibly made a bootleg sequel to his own movie in order to get the series to continue, and that wasn't enough to appease fans and critics. But even so, he apparently had some internal support at Fox, with then-CEO Stacey Snyder saying in September of 2017 that Covenant was a disappointment, but that she had faith in Scott's vision for the franchise. In October of that same year, Scott said that the third film will focus more on the androids and AI. It's not quite clear how far into the development process this project got, because Scott also said, Further leaks detailed that the third prequel film would take place on LV-426, the location of the original film, and followed David going up against a group of engineers who are out for revenge over his murderous actions on Planet 4. Ultimately, this would not come to be. After Fox was sold to Disney, that pretty much closed the books on Scott's prequel films. Disney just felt that it was a cleaner break to not continue down the path that Scott had established, instead opting for an alien TV show and alien Romulus. Was that the safer bet? Yes, definitely. Was it the less creatively interesting bet? Also yes. Look, do Prometheus and Covenant have rough patches and, frankly, dumb elements grafted onto them? Absolutely. But the fact that both of these movies are obviously deeply personal for Scott makes them endlessly fascinating. There's Scott trying to make sense of the incomprehensible, and ironically, also becoming something of an incomprehensible mess themselves. And Disney? They didn't get that. They just saw twin genre retreads that both underperformed at the box office. Thus, the Alien prequel trilogy was killed. Which, when considering how this trilogy panned out, feels appropriate.