Ridley Scott worried the ‘Alien’ series was over after 4, thinking ‘F—, that’s the end of a franchise’

Ridley Scott is happy with his 1979 film Alien, thinks James Cameron‘s 1986 sequel Aliens was “good,” but doesn’t have much positive to say about what followed.

“I think I felt it was deadened after 4,” Scott recently told ScreenRant, referring to 1997’s Alien: Resurrection. “I think mine was pretty damn good, and I think Jim’s was good, and I have to say the rest were not very good. And I thought, F—, that’s the end of a franchise which should be as important as bloody Star Trek or Star Wars.”

A comic book fan, Scott recalled he was appreciating the work of “the best in the world” Jean Giraud Moebius and was “suddenly offered Alien out of the blue.”

“And because designer is in my blood and DNA,” Scott continued, “I just knew what to do with it. And I was the fifth f—ing choice. Why you offered Robert Altman Alien, God only knows. Altman said, ‘Are you kidding? I’m not going to do this,’ and I went, ‘Are you kidding? I have to do this,’ because it borders and verges on heavy metal. So that’s where I went, and then it died.”

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Of course, the Alien franchise didn’t die. It was Scott who gave it a second resurrection in 2012 with Prometheus, an ambitious prequel to the franchise with a new ensemble cast, featuring stars like Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, and Charlize Theron.

Alien: Covenant followed in 2017, also helmed by Scott, but The Leftovers‘ Damon Lindelof was swapped out as screenwriter for a team comprised of John Logan (Gladiator) and Michael Green (Logan), among others.

Alien: Resurrection should have been a slam dunk, as it returned the original producing trio behind Alien and David Fincher‘s Alien 3 — Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill — to the franchise. The film also added Winona Ryder to the cast, and tapped Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon to write.

But the film directed by future Amélie filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet received middling reviews from critics and failed to achieve the same box office performance of Scott’s original or Cameron’s sequel. Scott isn’t entirely pessimistic on Alien films that don’t bear his or Cameron’s directorial stamps, however, as he praised Fede Álvarez‘s 2024 Alien: Romulus as “f—ing great.”