Movies
Here’s Why the ‘Alien’ Franchise Would Not Exist Without ‘Star Wars’
Not a Star Wars fan? Well if you’re an Alien fan, you should at least appreciate it.
Dan O’Bannon once famously said that he didn’t steal Alien from anybody – he stole it from “EVERYBODY.” Ridley Scott’s 1979 film, originally titled Star Beast, was penned by O’Bannon, who (along with co-writer Ronald Schusett) had a hell of a time selling a studio on the sci-fi horror tale. Believe it or not, there was a time when the project was completely dead in the water.
After almost making the film with Roger Corman, O’Bannon and Schusett ended up aligning with a new production company named Brandywine, which had ties to 20th Century Fox. The men behind Brandywine, Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill (The Warriors), famously reworked O’Bannon’s script a good deal, but 20th Century Fox just wasn’t sold on making Alien.
And then a little film called Star Wars came along in 1977.
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In the 2003 doc The Beast Within: The Making of Alien, O’Bannon and Gordon Carroll recalled just how much of an impact the success of Star Wars had on Alien getting made.
“When Star Wars came out and was the extraordinary hit that it was, suddenly science fiction became the hot genre,” said Carroll. Added O’Bannon, “They wanted to follow through on Star Wars, and they wanted to follow through fast – and the only spaceship script they had sitting on their desk was Alien.”
After Star Wars came out and was a huge success, Fox gave O’Bannon’s Alien script a green light and a budget, and Ridley Scott was soon thereafter brought on board. The rest is history.
Another interesting note here is that Ridley Scott recently credited the revival of the Star Wars franchise for reigniting his interest in making more Alien movies. “Star Wars will be a juggernaut. Why do you think I’m doing [Alien] sequels?” he said in 2015, just a month before The Force Awakens was released. It would seem that the two franchises are forever linked, and it’s rather fitting that both Alien: Covenant and Star Wars: The Last Jedi are headed our way this year – two films that certainly would not exist is not for the 1977 success of Star Wars.
Just goes to show how hugely influential a single film can be.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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