List of Alien films:
Alien (1979)
Alien II (1981) [1]
Alien 3-D (1983) [2]
Alien IV: Cold War (1989) [3]
Alien V: The Rock (1993) [4]
Alien: Virus (1998) [5]
Alien: Hive (2009) [6]
[1] The commercial success of Alien immediately instigated discussions of a sequel. Brandywine Productions had the support of 20th Century Fox President Alan Ladd Jr. but when he left to found the Ladd Company found his replacements less amenable. Brandywine founders and Alien producers Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill were incensed to find that Fox believed the success of Alien was a fluke, especially when the company was withholding profits from them via Hollywood accounting. A quickly launched suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, but what is known is that the rights to Alien passed from Fox to Brandywine as part of it. Brandywine took Alien II to their old patron Ladd who made an introduction for them at Warner Bros. (distribution partner of the Ladd Company) and production began towards the end of 1980 in the United Kingdom.
A direct sequel was out of the question, given the complex nature of the rights to the property. Indeed, before Alien II viewers are treated to the logos of Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox and The Ladd Company. Instead, Hill dusted off a script for a survival film he had first written in 1976 under the title The Prey. It involved a group of National Guardsmen on weekend manoeuvres who become lost in the Louisiana swamps and are preyed upon by Cajun hunter-trappers. The Cajuns were swapped out for multiple creatures like the one from the first film. The National Guardsmen were swapped out for space marines. And the Louisiana swamps were swapped out for a colony on a fog strewn swamp planet. Hill directed the film himself in the UK, where the first film was also produced, albeit this time with some location shooting in the forbidding Cairngorms and the infamous BBC quarry. It was during filming in the latter that some behind-the-scenes snaps were taken with a television production filming at the same time. The image of Tom Baker being menaced by a throng of aliens unlike his usual adversaries has inspired thousands of fanfictions since.
Walter Hill directed the film himself, from a script by himself and Giler, with some input from original writer Dan O'Bannon who was more involved with the pre-production of Ridley Scott's Dune, also for the Ladd Company. Leading the cast were Carolyn Seymour as scientist Daniels and Keith Carradine as marine corporal Hicks. The film was a modest success, with many noting the thematic elements seemingly drawn from the Vietnam War, but did less well than its successor having the misfortune to release only a month before Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was more successful than many other Ladd Company productions like Outland (1981) and Dune (1982), enough to convince the various studios involved that their shaky truce was worth competing.
[2] The early 1980s saw Hollywood go crazy for 3D for the first time since the 1950s. Much as the 1950s boom was in response to the popularity of television, so too was the early 1980s revival in response to the advent of home video. 1982 saw the second sequel to Friday the 13th released in 3D to great success, becoming the first film to knock Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial from the box office, where it had reigned supreme over the remains of Scott's Dune for months. More second sequels would go down the 3-D route, including Jaws 3-D, Amityville 3-D, and Alien 3-D.
The second sequel was shot in Southern California in an attempt to keep production costs down. Direction was turned over to John Carpenter, himself a victim of E.T.'s success when his first major studio film, The Thing, released on the same day as Dune, was similarly crushed beneath Spielberg's behemoth. The plot harkened back to 50s science fiction films with a spacecraft crashing near a ranching community on an extrasolar planet (which coincidentally looked a lot like the Southwestern United States). The seven unconscious survivors are taken to the local hospital whilst the firefighters wonder at the strange burn patterns visible on the ship. Sure enough, seven chestbursters for seven survivors are soon rampaging through the town. The film only barely made any profit, with the 3D gimmick failing to bring in audiences.
Retrospective reappraisals have been kinder to the film which found a new life on home video. Without the 3D dragging it down, home audiences were able to appreciate the moments of levity from the eccentric locals, the bantering interplay between the firefighter main characters, Carpenter's usual skill with a synth as the soundtrack, and the abilities of the director of Halloween in showing the aliens stalk and kill their prey. Despite overtures from the late 80s onward, Carpenter has refused to return to direct another Alien film, citing Alien 3-D as "a job" rather than a "personal project".
[3] By the time 1984 rolled around it appeared the Ladd Company was not making films that audiences of the 1980s would flock to see in droves. 1983 saw Alien 3-D, intended to be a provide a quick injection of cash to the company, had underperformed expectations. It also saw The Right Stuff, an epic historic drama about the early US space program, was a complete bomb despite critical acclaim and multiple Academy Award wins. The 1984 muted successes of David Lynch's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Sergio Leone's gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America seemed to confirm that the company's director-friendly approach was not a recipe for financial success. As the old adage goes: if you can't beat them, join them. Later in 1984 the company would release Police Academy, a bawdy comedy in the style of Animal House which became the 10th highest grossing film of the year. It was so successful that it generated four sequels all starring Steve Guttenberg. It was not until Guttenberg refused to return for a sixth that someone blew the dust of the Alien series. It has never been confirmed as anything other than a coincidence, but it did seem as though Police Academy replaced Alien as the company's workhorse series and the latter was only revived once the former was run into the ground.
Brandywine approached author William Gibson to pen the next film in 1988. His script involved conflict between Weylan-Yutani, the omnipresent megacorp from the first three films, and a new organisation - the Union of Progressive Peoples, or as Gibson refers to them in interviews, "space commies". Eric Red, a writer of cult horror films and frequent collaborator of the film's eventual director turned in a rewrite of Gibson's script that met with the approval of Brandywine, Ladd, and Kathryn Bigelow. That the action was largely set on a commercial space station allowed for a lot of satire on the excesses of 1980s American culture, and the presence of the UPP on the waning Cold War. The latter would inspire its eventual title - Alien 4: Cold War. It was also one of the earliest films to feature CG imagery under the auspices of Bigelow's husband, the director of OJ Simpson vehicle The Terminator: James Cameron.
Alien 4: Cold War would become one of the highest grossing films of 1989, a year known not only for its blockbusters but as the first year in which sequels made up 5 of the top 10 highest grossing films of the year. It cemented Bigelow's credentials as a director, made Jamie Lee Curtis a bona fide leading lady, won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and even netted Willem Defoe a Golden Globe nomination for his turn as a sleazy Weylan-Yutani executive. It also acted as a stalking horse for James Cameron, who convinced Warner Bros. and the Ladd Company to make the highest bid for Michael Chrichton's novel Jurassic Park, before it was even published. The special effects success of Alien 4 convinced studio executives of the possibilities of adapting the film. Before it, the studios were unlikely to back such a project helmed by a horror director with an interest in special effects.
[4] The instructions from the four masters of the Alien series (Brandywine, Fox, Ladd, Warner Bros.) were clear: do that again. The problem was that there were so many single location action films being made in the wake of Die Hard that it was difficult to find a concept that could be different enough even if set in space. With the exception of Walter Hill, each previous director was invited back to helm the fourth sequel. Bigelow and Carpenter both refused, and Ridley Scott initially agreed but his ideas went off in a radically different direction than what the producers wanted. Scott's ideas involved visiting the home world of the aliens, finding out about the makers of the derelict ship found in the first film, and bringing back Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley for the first time. Scott discussed the idea with Weaver before the studios had even been approached, but she turned him down telling the director that after everything Ripley had been through in the first film there was no way she would go to their home planet or even back to the derelict.
Scott was fired from the project at the behest of Fox, who still jealously guarded the rights to the first film, hoarding them from the other partners in the franchise. In his place, the studio hired writer/director Chuck Russell who had been successful in effects driven genre pictures before including the remake of The Blob and A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: The Dream Warriors. The latter had proved a redefinition of that series in the same way Cold War had for Alien. Russell and collaborator Frank Darabont drafted a script which carried forward Scott's idea of returning to the planet from the first film. Their version put a harsh penal colony on the planet which would rediscover the derelict and set the familiar plot in motion again. Conceived as a sort of "space Alcatraz", it and the barren nature of the planet would lend the fourth sequel its subtitle - Alien 5: The Rock.
Alien 5 failed to crack the top ten highest grossing films of 1993... barely. Much as they had a decade prior it seemed that the output of the Ladd Company had fallen behind the times. Family comedies, romantic comedies, dramas, historical epics, and action-thrillers dominated the box office that year. Critics were kind, but the effort from Russell could not help but feel a poor cousin to what Bigelow had produced four years prior. It also started the fan theory that the Alien films were more successful when they had a female lead. Alien and Alien 4 had been the most successful, starring Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis, respectively. Alien 3-D and Alien 5 had been the least successful, with the former based around a buddy dynamic between Tony Danza and Tom Atkins and the latter starring Kiefer Sutherland. Alien II, which featured Carolyn Seymour and Keith Carradine as its leads, fell smack in the middle.
[5] In some ways, Alien 5, despite making a profit, was the straw that broke the camel's back for the Ladd Company. They ended their partnership with Warner Bros. after over a decade and sold their share of the rights to produce Alien sequels to Fox. This led to legal action from Brandywine who felt their once strongest supporter was hanging them out to dry. Warner Bros. were similarly irate at being cut out unceremoniously. Everyone then sued everyone else. The end result was the Ladd Company being enshrined as a non-exclusive production company, which would eventually spell their demise as they could not form lasting relationships with major studios due to the requirements of the decision which was delivered in lieu of any financial penalties. Brandywine reverted back to their 1970s relationship with Fox, albeit now as part of the Time Warner conglomerate, who had bought out the company in the fallout of the suits and counter-suits. Between them, Fox and Warner horse-traded a few properties back-and-forth and resumed status quo ante bellum.
The end result was similar to the one in the 1980s, Fox retained all rights that pertained to Alien the film, but Brandywine (and, by extension, Time Warner) had the exclusive rights to produce sequels to that film. All this served to hold off any production of another Alien film until 1996. Not that this prevented the franchise from continuing in other media: novels, comic books, video games, action figures, and even an animated series targeted at children. Many spec scripts were received for further Alien sequels during the same period. When Warner decided to move ahead with production on a sixth film the first director they sought was one who had slipped through the net twice prior. Finnish director Renny Harlin was, like Carpenter, Bigelow and Russell before him, a horror director. He had been passed over for Alien 4 after wishing to do a film that explored either the aliens on Earth or their home planet. He further had to bow out of Alien 5 due to scheduling conflicts. He was given strict instructions about what he could not do with regard to the legal agreement with Fox, and further what he could not do as a result of Warner not wanting to spend much money.
The end result was a tale set on a research station where Weylan-Yutani scientists had finally been successful in capturing life specimens of the aliens for weapons research. The aliens manage to outsmart their jailers and seek to destroy enough of the station to erode its orbit and send them down to the inhabited planet below. Well aware of fan opinion on the success of Alien films vis a vis the gender of their protagonists. The lead was Joely Richardson as the main WY scientist. After five films of seeing such characters as the villains test audiences reacted negatively to her surviving, and a new ending was shot where the final alien manages to kill Richardson's character before being killed itself by Thomas Jane and Laurence Fishburne. A memorable scene in the film saw the film's biggest name, Samuel L. Jackson, impaled by an alien from above and dragged into the ventilation system right at the crescendo of a bombastically delivered monologue. Alien: Virus was a modest success when its box office was compared with its budget, but critical reception was more mixed praising the suspense and set pieces but criticising its lack of originality and leaning too far into B-movie tropes.
[6] The new Millennium did not prove conducive to more Alien films. Films specifically, since there were still all the same tie-ins there was during the 1990s. Someone was even naïve enough to greenlight another animated series. The reason for the lack of any new film for over a decade (the longest the series had ever gone without a new film) was simply that what little standards there was in a script being commissioned none for a new Alien sequel cut the mustard. They were all either too derivative of what had come before, too wild a departure from what had made the series successful, or too heavily based on concepts to which Fox held the rights. The latter was also the reason why no remake of Alien had ever been attempted when it seemed every other successful horror or science fiction film and their dog was being remade. A boom in popularity of a specific sort of horror fiction would allow a new Alien film to debut before the 00s ended.
Post-apocalyptic fiction in general, and zombie fiction specifically, had seen a boom in popularity during the 00s. So much so that Warner were ready to consider a radical change in direction for the Alien series. Enlisting Frank Darabont to both write and direction, the impetus was to do a film set on Earth in the midst of an apocalypse spurred by the appearance of aliens. It liberally adopted ideas that had been featured before in comic and prose versions of the same idea. The main narrative was set nearly a year after the first creatures began running amok, with numerous flashbacks to early days of the apocalypse. Laurie Holden played the main character, a former cop leading a struggling group of survivors. It was the first film to answer the question of where the eggs came from, taking from ideas originally proposed for Cold War.
Alien: Hive proved popular with critics, delivered a modest success at the box office, and even netted some award nominations. However, audiences were more split with critics, particularly over its nihilistic ending. Going off-piste had not proved more of a success than sticking to the formula had, as Warner saw it, so the series went back into hibernation again. There it remains, whilst spin-off media continues to be produced. No one has had the temerity to commission a third animated series. The complex legal issues surrounding the series has shielded it from the trend of reboots that have dominated Hollywood throughout the 2010s. It is also simultaneously too respected to go the straight-to-video route but too schlocky to get a prestige television version. As of 2023, it seems a new Alien film is still but a pipe dream but as the struggling Warner Bros. Discovery seeks to offload IP in order to show a profit, there remains a possibility that new ownership could revive the franchise. Somewhere in Anaheim, a Mouse licks its lips.
