Following in the footsteps of Ridley Scott's ALIEN and James Cameron's ALIENS certainly wouldn't be an easy feat at the best of times, but unfortunately, development on ALIEN 3 proved to be quite the ordeal, and even when production actually got underway under David Fincher, it was far from smooth sailing. William Gibson was one of the first people to take a crack at the script based on early treatments, but the producers were unsatisfied with what he had come up with and went in a new direction.
Gibson's script took place after the events of ALIENS and finds the Sulaco drifting into an area of space claimed by a group called the Union of Progressive People. Ripley, Hicks, Newt, and Bishop are taken to a space station/shopping mall called Anchorpoint and discover that the U.P.P. and Weyland-Yutani are secretly developing an alien army. Naturally, shit goes sideways and the station is overrun with bloodthirsty xenomorphs. The film would have ended with a teaser for a fourth movie as Bishop would suggest to Hicks that humans must track the aliens to their source and destroy them. Obviously, that's not the ALIEN 3 we would get, but fans of William Gibson's script will be pleased to know that Dark Horse Comics will be bringing Gibson's vision to life in an upcoming five-issue comic series. In a statement to CBR, William Gibson said:
When your first contracted screenplay (or screenplay of any kind, in my case) isn’t produced, but the film is eventually made with a different screenplay, retaining nothing of yours but a barcode tattoo on the back of a character’s neck, the last thing you ever expect is to see yours beautifully adapted and realized, decades later, in a different medium, by an artist of Johnnie Christmas’ caliber. It’s a wonderful experience, and I have no doubt that Johnnie’s version, which adheres almost entirely to the script, delivers more of my material to the audience than any feature film would have been likely to do.
Here's a five-page preview of the first issue which will be released on November 7, 2018: