these were pretty popular movies, so why did they wait so long to make the sequels. And, did the last two terrible movies, Prometheus and Covenant spoil the brand so badly they will drop any attempts to make more?
shareIn relation to Aliens (the sequel) and my memory of what happened, Ridley Scott's films after Alien were not box office successes (Blade Runner and Legend) and so he probably didn't have much weight in wanting to do a sequel.
On the other hand, the success of the low-budget Terminator put James Cameron into a position where he could choose what to do next and he wanted to do the space combat Aliens idea.
I have to admit I liked Aliens better than Alien, and Ridley Scott's ideas for Alien sequels have been kind of bizarre. I think everyone wanted to see a sequel to Alien, surely if he wanted to do it someone would have financed it way back at some point. I think he did not know what to do to further the plot and not ruin it. The last two movies might have actually been good had he been able to avoid the most-stupid-character syndrome. The stupidity of the characters and lack of preparation undermined these movies from the start.
shareScott didn't want to make an inferior sequel to Alien and had no real idea where to take the story. Cameron decided to take the story down an action route. His main source influence was the novel of Starship Troopers and the Vietnam war.
shareBack in those days quality mattered. Yes, turning a profit mattered too, but film studios would usually (I didn't say always) wait until they had a good script in place before they began making a sequel to a popular movie. These days film studios just churn out whatever crap that they can in order to make a buck. Just look at what disney did to Star Wars. It's like they didn't even try to make a movie that was even halfway passable. The mind set seems to have become screw the customer we will put out whatever we want, and no matter how bad it is the masses will like it, and accept it...
sharePerhaps for mainstream movies, but they were churning out horror sequels like crazy back then.
shareYeah, and most of them were terrible, but that doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy them.
shareThere were huge fights between Fox and anyone else(Ridley Scott, producers, etc) involved with making the first Alien movie. It was a surprise HUGE hit and there was a lot of money floating around and Fox wanted to keep basically all of it. They kept a tight fist around the rights to the movie, selling it to cable and then the networks so there was that long chain of income over several years. They didn't think of a sequel until they had exhausted all their revenue stream and along came James Cameron with Terminator..it was the perfect time to keep the revenue stream humming along.
I remember my roommate in early 1987 buying a VHS release of Alien for $99..soon after Top Gun came out on VHS and they started selling them cheap for the first time ever.I think it sold for a shocking price of $19.99. Everybody bought VHS tapes when prices got this low!
Blind, ignorant nostalgia is not a good look.
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