Ridley Scott gets candid about James Cameron’s Aliens, why Prometheus failed

In space, no one can hear you scream. But in the news, everybody can hear your gripes. As he gears up for the release of another sequel in Gladiator II, Ridley Scott is opening up about not only how he got sidestepped for Aliens but also his take on the rest that followed, including his own.

Speaking with Deadline, Ridley Scott remembered being told by James Cameron just how the Alien franchise would be moving forward – and how that all changed when he himself stepped aside. Remember, Scott maintains that he wasn’t even offered the chance to direct Aliens despite 1979’s Alien being a smash at the box office. “Jim told me, ‘Listen, I can’t get it as frightening because you’ve just shown the beast enough that it’s no longer fresh. But it works, still.’ He said, ‘I’m going to go military.’ That’s what Jim said. I said, ‘Gotcha.’ Jim’s was a very good sequel. Three and four became more and more difficult. As it unrolled, I thought, oh God, they’re f*cking it up. And then from that, honestly, I said okay, that’s done.”

But Ridley Scott would of course return to the Alien franchise for 2012’s Prometheus, which brought Ridley Scott back to the Alien franchise after more than 30 years and three other directors. On this stage, Scott stated, “Years later, I saw this bloody film that they keep playing every night somewhere on the globe, on all the platforms. There’s life in the best, yet. That’s why I sat down with the great writer [Damon] Lindelof, and we reconstructed a resurrection of the era, with Prometheus, and how it evolved from Alien. But we were asleep at the wheel. My advisors, who frankly no longer are with me, were asleep at the wheel, certainly. And I partly blame myself, except I was busy making other films. And so it was let go and it shouldn’t have been…”

As for being busy, Ridley Scott is absolutely guilty of this, helming nine movies since Prometheus, one of which was yet another Alien movie, 2017’s Covenant (a film he thinks deserves a sequel more than this year’s Romulus). But Scott has also been tied up in his latest sequel, Gladiator II, which turned out better than a lot of us expected and demonstrates that Scott can be perfectly capable of helming a sequel to one of his greatest films.

Outside of James Cameron’s Aliens, what do you think stands as the best Alien sequel?