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Aliens Is Great... But It Also Killed The Franchise


https://screenrant.com/aliens-movie-good-killed-alien-franchise/

James Cameron's Alien is one of the best sequels of all time, but its drastic changes from the original ruined the trajectory of the Alien franchise.

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This is really something. I just watched Alien 3 the other day and thought how much better received it would have been if there was no Aliens in between it and the first film.

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It could be part of that, but I feel it was mostly how they treated some of the characters from Aliens that spoiled people's perception of that film. Some of the creature effects hurt the film as well. But Alien 3 still better than anything we have had since.

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"much better received it would have been if there was no Aliens in between it and the first film."

very good point - its so similar to the original in many ways

but after Aliens , everyone want pew pew shooty shooty bang bang boo ya!

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That guy is too enthusiastic about the next alien film. No matter what happens in the new film, it will simply be a retread of old ideas. The story was told in two movies, and the rest were not necessary.

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Not really.

There wasn't much else you could do after the first one. You could do a sequel with another alien in another closed space, but what's the point when the original is a masterpiece? Doing the same movie again?

The great thing about Cameron's Aliens is that it takes the same creature but it creates something completely different from the first movie. Alien is a perfect horror scifi movie, Aliens is a perfect military scifi one. Someway it's the same Louis Master McBujold did in the Vorkosigan saga, keeping the universe and the characters and shifting between genres, in her case, from mystery to thriller to comedy to military scifi to romance drama.

Ridley Scott and Cameron created two different (and completely brilliant) views of it. They didn't kill the franchise. It's just that there's no much else you can do with it (besides re-doing these two movies again, which is what the franchise did).

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The great thing about Cameron's Aliens is that it takes the same creature but it creates something completely different from the first movie.

Exactly. Cameron took the idea from the first film and just went further with it. Instead of being isolated on the ship and the alien coming to them in the first film, they went after the alien on their planet in the sequel.

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Not really. It wasn’t the aliens planet.

And they were still isolated with the aliens. More humans and more aliens but still pretty much isolated, in a bit bigger space.

But yeah, the genre is different…

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Exactly. It was different but it felt like a natural progression. In the original they stumbled upon this unknown creature.
Now the audience knows they exist. We see learn more about the species we encountered in the first. It dont look like at it as being disrespectful to the first film, as much as building upon it.
Alien 3 just shit on Aliens and tried to rehash Alien with less likable characters.

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i mean you could put aliens in other genres. like a thriller mystery scifi.
people get lost on a station, who killed them?

or you could tell from the aliens perspective. deep diving in the alien "society" where do they come from, how did they evolve? how did they get into space.
prometheus and Covenant tried to explore that, but they were shit.

tons of stuff left to explore in the alien universe.

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Do you ever post your own opinion or just copy and paste others?

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I disagree. It would've been boring to repeat the original, again.

Low-quality sequels is what destroyed the franchise beginning with Alien 3, but especially the horrible Alien 4.

I read a few excellent Alien novels which had no problem creating compelling stories. One of them was about the aliens infesting the Earth. They should have made that movie.

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They tried, it’s called AvP and it was a failure …

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"Aliens: Earth Hive" by Steve Perry was the first in a trilogy book series which was great. They could've been entertaining movies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliens:_Earth_Hive

AvP sounds like a money grab with a boring premise.

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It was a horrible idea to set Alien 3 on a penal colony that contained not a single likable character, except perhaps for the doctor who dies before you can say "bad idea." Even worse, the increasingly psychotic Ripley doesn't generate as much sympathy this time around. In Aliens, I was rooting for every character standing at the end except for the corporate guy Burke. Even Lieutenant Gorman was sufficiently remorseful and heroic to be likeable by the end. In Alien 3 I didn't care who lived or died. And that's just problem 1 with it.

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Yep. Dragging the franchise beyond 2 films is what sank the name brand

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Well said, ccr. Another thing that sucked all the life - and suspense - out of ALIEN 3 is the audience knowing Ripley won’t be attacked. That leaves the suspense hinging on the other characters, and there isn’t one we give a hoot about.

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Yeah you had no idea who was being killed off in the tunnel sequence nor did you care.
They all looked the same, they all sounded the same and you didn't care about any of them. It was a cheap B movie.
You felt every death in Aliens.

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Wrong, retard. Alien 3 foolishly killing Hicks, Newt, and Ripley and being an objectively boring movie killed the franchise.

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Spot on. James Cameron, in particular, used to understand very well the importance of interesting, distinctive, and likeable protagonists in sci-fi action films. Alien 3 failed miserably in this regard. Twentieth Century Fox was dumb not to follow Cameron's lead. From what I've heard Alien 3 was in development hell for a long while and suffered numerous script rewrites, even during filming. David Fincher immediately disowned the film because of the studio interference and he hasn't softened his opinion since. Sigourney Weaver backed Fincher up on this and deserves credit for helping him weather the storm of what could have been a career-killing movie. Michael Biehn was originally going to be the new lead character for the third film, but the studio backtracked on that idea. Biehn was so irritated by the sloppy manner in which 20th Century Fox went about producing this turd that he refused to let them use a dummy of his likeness, consenting only to the use of his digital image. Supposedly he got a big paycheck just for that. If I had to guess, David Giler and Walter Hill are the primary culprits for this franchise killler. But they may have been at the mercy of even higher studio execs.

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I have no idea if this is true, but supposedly he got more money for letting them use that photo in Alien 3 then he did for his role in Aliens.
Good for him.

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"Killed The Franchise"
Franchise?

These are 21st century marketing terms for movie producers to wring every last cent out of an idea by killing it to death by countless pointless sequels.

When Ripley Scott made Alien he wasnt planning a (ugh) "Franchise" he was making a movie and telling a story with an actual ending.

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What other word could be used, then?

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Series I guess

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"Series" is OK, but most people don't use it, as they imply that movies and TV shows in the same series shouldn't be counted.

I think they chose the term "franchise", as it is ultimately about making money, regardless of quality or public perception.

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