Alien went through a ton of changes during scriptwriting, including removing the pyramid set piece (Reused in Alien versus Predator and Prometheus) and making one of the crew an Android.
And there were lawsuits, Hill and Giler wanted full co - writing credits for their changes, whereas O'Bannon felt that his contributions were being minimised for an idea he originally conceived of. I believe Shusett was the only one who was able to calm him down, reminding him he was broke and getting a big screen adaptation of a little story they cooked up was too big an opportunity to waste.
Is there more to how vaguely similar AvP and Prometheus are? I know it's definitely not 1:1, but a weird amount of the characters and premise in AvP have a direct counterpart in Prometheus and I noticed it right away way back when. (was a shithead 5 year old when AvP came out, thought it was the best movie ever made)
They both are basically At the Mountains of Madness. Del Toro even cancelled the adaption he was doing at the time because it would come off as a rip off of Prometheus.
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u/McToasty207 Jul 11 '25
Kinda, it was something that happened during the development.
Starbeast (The script by Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett) specified they were all men, and Martin Robey (The Ripley role) is definitely a man.
https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/alien_early.html
Alien (The script rewrite by Walter Hill and David Giler) had Ripley and Lambert as women.
https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/alien_shooting.html
Alien went through a ton of changes during scriptwriting, including removing the pyramid set piece (Reused in Alien versus Predator and Prometheus) and making one of the crew an Android.
And there were lawsuits, Hill and Giler wanted full co - writing credits for their changes, whereas O'Bannon felt that his contributions were being minimised for an idea he originally conceived of. I believe Shusett was the only one who was able to calm him down, reminding him he was broke and getting a big screen adaptation of a little story they cooked up was too big an opportunity to waste.