The movie that offended Sigourney Weaver simply by existing: “Why would you want to do that?”
In Hollywood, the push and pull between art and commerce is ever-present. Every creative person in the industry wants to make good, fulfilling, worthwhile films that speak to the human condition or smartly entertain audiences. Conversely, no actor, writer, or director wants to feel like they are making a movie purely to bank big bucks at the box office, even though that is the very thing that the industry lives and dies by. The dichotomy can lead to a situation like the one Sigourney Weaver faced in the early 1990s when she got wind of a planned studio cash-in that offended her by its very existence.
In 1989, a comic book series was released by Dark Horse Comics that excited the bean counters at 20th Century Fox a whole lot. It united two of the studio’s most lucrative properties in one crossover story that sounded like a license to print money. A year later, the second instalment of one of these properties hit the big screen and included a tease for a potential crossover that eagle-eyed fans spotted. Before long, screenwriter Peter Briggs was tapped to adapt the comic into a screenplay for a blockbuster Alien vs Predator movie.
Briggs’ script draft was completed in 1991, but by that point, Fox was already deep in the weeds of Alien 3. Ultimately, the concept was put on a shelf for the next decade, but while making that ill-fated third Alien picture, Weaver got wind of the potential for the spinoff. She had no desire to be involved in something she viewed as a shameless cash-grab and later claimed to The Independent, “It’s the reason I wanted my character to die in the first place.” Indeed, her iconic character Ellen Ripley did perish at the climax of Alien 3 – although she was resurrected as a clone in 1997’s Alien: Resurrection.
Fast-forward to the early ’00s, though, and Fox did its own resurrection job with Alien vs Predator. At this point, Alien director Ridley Scott had already been working with Aliens maestro James Cameron on a potential Alien 5. However, instead of putting all their (alien) eggs in the basket of the visionaries who shaped the franchise into what it was, Fox finally greenlit their lowest common denominator comic book crossover. Cameron raged that the movie would “kill the validity of the franchise” and added, “To me, that was Frankenstein Meets Werewolf. It was Universal just taking their assets and starting to play them off against each other. Milking it.”
In the end, Alien vs Predator was directed by Resident Evil’s Paul WS Anderson and was released in August 2004 to vitriolic reviews – not least from Weaver, who hated the very fact it even existed at all. “There’s an Alien vs Predator movie out now, which is something I’m quite happy not to be in,” she quipped. “I really don’t know much about the Predator except that it looks like a hedgehog. It would be painful for me to watch the Alien get whupped; I’d be cheerleading shamelessly for it, but I probably won’t see it because I don’t really enjoy that kind of movie.”
Weaver admitted in 2016 that she’d still never plucked up the nerve – or the enthusiasm – to watch Alien vs Predator or Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, its truly dismal 2007 sequel. In fact, she told Radio Times that the fact Fox lowered itself to making those movies “really depressed” her because she was “very proud” of the core Alien movies she was a part of. All in all, it’s pretty undeniable that art should have won out over commerce in this instance.
