Sigourney Weaver’s ‘Alien’ payday: The lowball deal that led to a legendary sequel
Weaver is now a legend of the big-screen legend, but the role that launched her career did not initially prove a major pay day.
Now a three-time Oscar nominee worth a reported $60 million, Hollywood great Sigourney Weaver was paid just $35,000 for her first major film role, when she played the lead in the 1979 sci-fi classic Alien.
But Weaver, who was a 28-year-old, less-than-wealthy stage actor when she was cast as Alien heroine Ellen Ripley, says the sum certainly didn’t feel insignificant at the time.
“So much more money than I’d ever made”
“I was immensely relieved to feel that I could have a career, because I wasn’t getting paid anything in off-Broadway,” she told an interview with Bustle in 2021.
“Honestly I thought I could live on that for the rest of my life,” she added. “I was so excited to go out and just pick up the tab. I remember thinking, Oh well, now I don’t really ever have to work again.
“It was so much more money than I’d ever made, and that made me really happy that I could support myself.”
Alien propels Weaver to stardom
The first instalment in a long-running, highly lucrative film franchise that has now spawned nine movies, Alien was a box-office smash when it was released in May 1979.
Directed by Ridley Scott, it was the fifth-highest-grossing picture in the U.S. that year, earning nearly $80m at domestic theaters, according to figures compiled by Box Office Mojo.
Weaver’s greater status leads to Aliens standoff
Alien proved the launch pad for Weaver’s big-screen career - and by the time the 1986 sequel Aliens was made, the New York native had well and truly established herself as a major Hollywood star.
Having also featured in hits such as 1984’s supernatural comedy Ghostbusters, she found herself in a position to negotiate a far, far more lucrative deal for the second instalment of the Alien franchise.
Indeed, Weaver’s greater bargaining power was the source of major pre-production strife, as it made bosses at 20th Century Fox hesitant to commit to basing the sequel around her.
As explained by the Los Angeles Times’ David T. Friendly, this reluctance led to a studio stand-off with Aliens director James Cameron, who even walked away from the project for a period.
“Cameron and [producer Gale Anne] Hurd insisted that Sigourney Weaver and only Weaver play the lead,” Friendly writes. “But Fox executives argued that they could not publicly take such a position because that would severely crimp their negotiating posture.”
However, Weaver was finally cast as the movie’s star, having secured a pay packet of close to $1m plus a share of the profits, per Friendly.
With Weaver back as Ripley, Aliens emulated the first film’s popularity, taking $85 million in the U.S. after its release in July 1986. What’s more, the movie earned Weaver the first Oscar nod of her career, when she went up for Best Actress at the 59th Academy Awards.
Over the following decade, she proceeded to feature in two more Alien films, again netting multi-million-dollar sums for 1992’s Alien 3 and 1997’s Alien Resurrection.
How much has Sigourney Weaver made from Alien franchise?
Across her four appearances in the film franchise, Weaver is estimated by ScreenRant to have pocketed just over $16 million, although this calculation appears not to take into account her profit-sharing earnings.
Will Weaver play Ripley again?
Nearly 30 years since she last appeared as Ellen Ripley, Weaver hasn’t entirely ruled out returning to the screen as the iconic character. She says, though, that Ripley “has earned her rest”.
“I feel like she’s never far away from me, but on the other hand I have yet to read a script that said ‘you have got to do this,’” Weaver told a 2024 interview with Deadline.
“So for me, she is in this other dimension, safe from the Alien for the time being. I don’t really think about it, but you know, it’s not completely impossible, and certainly a lot of good filmmakers are inspired by the material.
“How much does the public really need or want another Ripley movie? I don’t really sit around and think about it, but if it came up, I would consider it.
“It has come up a bunch of times, but I’m also busy doing other things. Ripley has earned her rest.”
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