During a recent Alien: Romulus screening with Collider, director Fede Alvarez talked about the potential of diving back into the franchise—specifically if he’d be up for taking on an Alien vs. Predator crossover picture. As it turns out, he has actually given such a project some thought, but is realistic enough to know that his ideal version of a new Alien vs. Predator film would be all but impossible to realize.
“The way I would do it, most likely, if it could be done this way… It’s harder to keep secrets online… The best AVP will be the one that you don’t know is AVP until the other guy shows up.” he told Collider. “You think you’re watching a Predator movie, and then they land in some place and there are creatures, and fucking hell, it’s a Xenomorph. That would get me. ‘Fuck yeah!’ You’d go crazy. Or vice versa, you’re in an Alien movie, and then suddenly a mysterious creature is there, and you can hear that sound, and you see the cloak, and you go, ‘Is that a fucking Predator?’ And then turns out it is. That would be the way to do it, don’t you think? Once you put it in the title, it’s like, ‘Spoiler alert.’”
Pull one over on us and get away with it? In our age of internet spoiler culture, he really thinks this could fly? I mean they had to cover Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth in giant raincoats to hide their Wicked cameos. Are we really going to expect our Alien Queen to go by unnoticed under an umbrella? Kidding aside, any Alien or Predator production would have set pieces that are pretty obvious with iconic weapons and eggs, so we hardly think it will be an easy path for Alvarez to take now that it’s known.
Dropping a surprise reveal on the audience is something Alvarez thought about doing in Alien: Romulus, he explained; his original pitch, he said, was “We don’t say Alien. We just put any random science fiction title… It was this whole thing, ‘And then suddenly [the characters] walk into a room, and there’s a fucking egg’ … That was the original plan.”
Of course, that didn’t end up happening, but Alvarez did tuck one big element into Romulus that he hoped would at least surprise audiences who saw it early enough to avoid being spoiled. “Rook [the Ian Holm-inspired character] in this movie was something that we kept as a secret until it was the last second,” he said. “Most of you, hopefully, didn’t know until you went in on opening night .. the few screenings we did before the movie [opened in theaters], I begged everybody, ‘Please do not ruin it for everybody else. Do not post about Ian Holm being in the film.’”
As for the possibility of a new Alien vs. Predator movie, surprise or otherwise, Alvarez sounded more than open to working with Prey director and current Predator franchise architect Dan Trachtenberg. “I can’t speak for Dan,” Alvarez said. “At some point … one day if we feel like, ‘Yeah, [a new AVP is] what we cannot wait to see,’ I think that’s a movie we could do.” Trachtenberg has Predator: Badlands arriving this fall.
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