‘Alien’ Alternate Ending: Ripley Was Originally Supposed To Die
Alienhad a notoriously high death count when it first hit theaters in 1979, horrifying theatergoers with its gore and blend of horror and sci-fi.
But directorRidley Scott, who is promoting his return to theAlienfranchise with the upcomingAlien: Covenant, had in mind one more body to add to that death toll: Ellen Ripley. The de facto star of the followingAlienmovies was never originally intended to survive beyond the first film, according to a recently revealed alternate ending.
The first movie to introduce us to the terrifying “facehuggers” and the looming Xenomorphs they would grow to be, was also the first movie to introduceSigourney Weaveras a bonafide action star. The lone survivor of her spaceship that had been slaughtered by the titular Alien, Weaver’s Ellen Ripley went on to become a pop culture icon, especially with her appearance inAliens, which transformed the timid crew member into a flamethrower-toting badass.
That was not the original intention that Scott had in mind when he first directedAlienback in 1979. Instead of triumphantly battling the Xenomorph and recording a captain’s log entry before grabbing brave orange cat Jones to go into hypersleep with her, theAlienalternate ending had Ripley meet a different fate. Scott revealed toEntertainment Weekly:
“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.”
Next, Scott says, he’d have cut to the tentacles of the alien pressing buttons on the dashboard. “It would mimic Captain Dallas [Skerritt] saying, ‘I’m signing off.'”
Entertainment Weekly provided an illustration of how that ending would look.
It’s a harrowing ending for an already gruesome sci-fi movie, to have no human survivors at the end and the Xenomorph triumphing at the end of the day. No word on whether Jones would have survived.
When Scott pitched this idea from Shepperton Studios outside London to the suits at 20th Century Fox, he was met with anger. “The first executive from Fox arrived on set within 14 hours, threatening to fire me on the spot,” Scott said with a laugh. “So we didn’t do that [ending].” We — and surely Weaver, who went on to play the role of Ellen Ripley three more times — are grateful.
Nearly 40 years later, another sci-fi horror movie with glaring parallels toAlienpulled off the ending that Scott wanted to do.Lifeended in (spoiler alert, highlight to reveal)asimilarly bleak fashion, with the alien life form overpowering and killing the final star, and supposedly going on to wreak havoc on Earth.
And with Scott’s ownAlien: Covenanthitting theatersMay 19, which signals the franchise’s return to the narrow-corridor horror film of the original 1979Alien, he may be able to finally go through with his original ending.
