Ridley Scott admits his mistake in believing the 'Alien' franchise was completely dead

Ridley Scott is a movie legend, and among all his creations one of the most outstanding is ‘Alien’, which is still very much alive today thanks to the huge success of ‘Alien: Romulus’. In an interview with Total Film magazine, picked up by GamesRadar, Scott talked about the ‘Alien’ saga and his perception, which turned out to be wrong, that it was completely dead.

On how he left the ‘Alien’ saga for dead, Ridley Scott points out that “I think, wrongly, on Alien I thought the old beast had worn out. Because when we did the first [set of films], it was me, Jim [Cameron], David [Fincher], and the French guy [Jean-Pierre Jeunet] – there were four. They wore out. The beast wore out. And, in a funny kind of way, I found the beast partly by accident. Without that alien, you wouldn’t have ever had this film. With all the great casting in the world, when you have a film where it’s about being locked in with a creature – you better have the creature right.”

‘Alien: Romulus’ brings the saga back to the top

Scott spoke in the interview about the need he felt to bring the saga back to the top, how important it was: “And I sat and thought, ‘What a pity, because this is a huge franchise – maybe biggest apart from Star Wars and Star Trek ever – with legs.’ Because there’s still a long way to go with it. So I sat down with Damon Lindelof, actually. We sat down at a table, and spun a wheel to see: where could we go? And it all began with Prometheus…”

Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez has brought the Alien franchise back to the forefront. ‘Alien: Romulus’ was a huge success, becoming the second-best opening in the franchise’s history, and managed to make a total of $42 million in its first weekend in theaters. Curiously, the honor of highest-grossing film goes to Prometheus, as the lure of seeing Ridley Scott direct another movie from the Alien universe attracted the attention of many moviegoers worldwide.