Alien’s original ending was changed because it was “too dark”

Everyone knows how Alien ends: Ripley blasts the xenomorph out of the airlock and into space before going back into cryosleep with her cat. It was nearly so much worse.

1979’s Alien is one of the best horror movies ever made, introducing one of cinema’s great heroines: Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the steadfast, sole survivor of the Nostromo.

In the film’s second half, the spiky-tailed, double-mouthed, acid-bleeding monster slowly picks off the spaceship’s crew. Just when she thinks she’s made it out alive in an escape pod, the alien reveals itself – but she flushes it out before it can kill her.

It’s a triumphant ending (if you don’t think about her drifting around in space on her own), but Ridley Scott originally wanted to kill off Ripley.

Ripley nearly died in Alien

“I thought that the alien should come in, and Ripley harpoons it and it makes no difference, so it slams through her mask and rips her head off,” Scott explained to Entertainment Weekly in 2017.

If he got his way, there probably wouldn’t have been an Aliens or a franchise (which has grossed $1.6 billion before we even get to Alien: Romulus’ release).

That’s not all: not only would the xenomorph kill Ripley, but it would then press buttons on a dashboard and “mimic Captain Dallas [Tom Skerritt] saying, ‘I’m signing off.'”

Scott pitched it to the folks at 20th Century Fox. “The first executive arrived on set within 14 hours, threatening to fire me on the spot… so we didn’t do that [ending],” he added.

Weirdly, it’s almost an echo of Predator’s ending: just when Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) thinks he has the monster beat, it presses the buttons to start the countdown on its self-destruct device before imitating a human’s laugh.

However, it’s safe to say that fans do not like Scott’s original idea. “Idk how you can go farther from there. Also, I think this ending would have ruined people’s perspectives on the movie. Because honestly? This ending sounds stupid as hell,” one Redditor commented.

“The whole point of the xenomorphs is that they can’t be reasoned with, they can’t be bargained with, their mission is to propagate their species… they’re supposed to be the worst animalistic qualities of humanity,” another wrote.

Not everyone’s against it, though. “This was changed by the studio because it would have been too dark, but I always found it to be an interesting twist, because it would have meant the alien had human-level intelligence the entire time,” one user suggested.

“I would prefer if a search party or something came in and heard Ripley screaming, only for it revealed to be the Xeno mimicking the screams before attacking them,” another commented.

Before the new movie hits cinemas, find out if Alien: Romulus is connected to the Isolation game, what you need to know about its age rating, and when Romulus takes place in the Alien timeline.