Why is it so seemingly difficult for producers to drop Ripley’s character?

Started by nanison, Aug 02, 2021, 10:40:51 PM

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Why is it so seemingly difficult for producers to drop Ripley’s character? (Read 10,325 times)

nanison

They keep want to bring her back. Her cycle ended with alien 3, it was not a perfect film but a good ending for the Ripley saga. They brought her back cloned in Alien 4 and then Blomkamp wanted to bring her back for alien 5.

Why do producers and writers think the alien can't exist without ripley? We as alien fans love Ripley but we love the alien more... just a write a new movie with different characters, clean slate. Not a remake or a reboot either just a new film in the universe.

Anyway the upcoming tv show will probably do that so that's good lol

Nightmare Asylum

It should be pretty telling that in the "modern" era (that being, after the AVP movies when the franchises separated) none of the Ripley-centered ideas have moved forward, and that we have instead gotten Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, and the upcoming Noah Hawley series, all of which do not feature Ripley.

Certain people (like Neill Blomkamp and Walter Hill, in the last few years) have tried to bring Ripley back but it seems like the studio (be it pre-sale 20th Century Fox or post-sale 20th Century Studios) doesn't have much interest in returning to Ripley.

nanison

Yeah true but then again Prometheus is hardly an alien film and it would be impossible for Ripley to show up in the prequels.
Adding the character in a "vs" film wouldn't make much sense either.
In the main continuous alien franchise they clearly are looking for a way to bring Ripley back.
I don't get it really, the star of the franchise is the monster not the characters.



Highland

Watching Alien last night I wondered if they would re-boot it, but decided the film is perfect. It would be like re-booting Jaws.

Simple fact is now Sigourney is too old to star in any Alien Film.

The TV series is 100% the right move for both fans and story tellers.

judge death

My bet is on they will reboot it with a new ripley charachter since franchises like this must have it.(looking at you star wars and that its disney).
but yes, since Aliens I would argue we should have gone on from ripley and create new stories with new people etc, but franchises and fanbases for the most part depends on same hero to be in it, and the movie makers know this, its why Ripley is in all movies and they want sigourney in it.

TC

From an EU fan's point of view, the alien is the reappearing star, just as nanison said.

But from the studio's point of view, following Aliens, a Weaver-less Alien film would be like a Die Hard movie without Bruce Willis.

With Prometheus, Ridley Scott had the power to convince Fox that he had the ability to kickstart the franchise with a completely different vehicle to drive it forward—namely, the dangerous android narrative, with Fassbender as its star.

As for a reboot: There's a reflex reaction against such a thing by many fans, because traditionally a reboot means the studio retires all support for the old stuff and encourages the fans to forget about its existence too, putting all their support behind the new reboot instead. When films were exclusively distributed in theatres, it made good business sense not to have your new stuff competing in the same marketplace as the old.

But that's rather old fashioned thinking. These days we have home video and streaming with which audiences continue to revisit original films at will. And philosophically, the current storytelling landscape is showing us over and over again that "alternate universe" stories are valid forms of franchise-making, especially when jumping to a different medium.

Quite apart from Noah Hawley's project, I could see a "remix" of the entire feature film series (and even incorporating EU material like Seegson, the Cold Forge, etc) rewritten as a streaming show, pulling Shaw and David, Ripley, the Nostromo, Hadley's Hope and Newt, Fiorina, and the Auriga all into a single, contiguous, saga, not being spread out over a hundred year long narrative the way they currently are. The kernel of the plots would remain, but the characters and details of the storylines would be reimagined, much like Marvel's "Civil War" comic book was reimagined for the Avengers MCU.

TC

SpreadEagleBeagle

SpreadEagleBeagle

#6
ALIEN 3 was the perfect ending of the original Alien saga. They should've just continued with new characters from there on. We would've probably had Alien 5, 6 & 7 by now if it wasn't for A:R. I don't know if that's actually a good or bad thing, but from a sequel perspective A:R made it extremely hard to make a sequel or a prequel to A:R (as in set not that far after A3).

Local Trouble

Quote from: Local Trouble on Oct 10, 2018, 12:10:30 AM
At least Alien 3 left all the worldbuilding intact...then Alien Resurrection flushed it all down the toilet.

The Necronoir

Quote from: nanison on Aug 02, 2021, 10:40:51 PM
They keep want to bring her back. Her cycle ended with alien 3, it was not a perfect film but a good ending for the Ripley saga. They brought her back cloned in Alien 4 and then Blomkamp wanted to bring her back for alien 5.

Why do producers and writers think the alien can't exist without ripley? We as alien fans love Ripley but we love the alien more... just a write a new movie with different characters, clean slate. Not a remake or a reboot either just a new film in the universe.

Anyway the upcoming tv show will probably do that so that's good lol

The main reason (from a studio perspective) is that it's simply easier to wheel out a well-loved character with built-in audience traction, rather than put in the hard yards establishing new ones. It's a microcosm of the larger sequel vs original property tug of war. What they often don't factor in is that bad writing will inevitably ground the character down to the point that they cease to be interesting. There's an art to making a sequel that truly expands upon and enriches the characters it inherits from previous movies. But studio execs aren't writers.

Kimarhi

Quote from: Local Trouble on Aug 05, 2021, 10:04:08 PM
Quote from: Local Trouble on Oct 10, 2018, 12:10:30 AM
At least Alien 3 left all the worldbuilding intact...then Alien Resurrection flushed it all down the toilet.

As much as I dislike Prometheus, Resurrection was the movie that almost killed the franchise. 

nanison

Yeah alien 4 was really stupid, though I really loved it back then as it was my first alien film in the cinema. That end boss beast thing looked terrifying to me as well as properly nasty.
These days I don't like much of it, Ripley was not Ripley anymore, the queen and other locked up aliens don't sit well with me, the crew of heroes are irritating. I did like the underwater sequence though.

Nightmare Asylum

I had the opposite reaction with Resurrection – didn't care for it much at all to start with, and I still don't like Whedon's script, but these days I get a lot of enjoyment out of it as a showcase of the Alien universe through Jeunet's nutso stylings. Almost like a Dark Horse comic come to life.

Kimarhi

I hated the tone of the fourth film.  It is a script designed to laugh at itself.  There is nothing to take seriously.  I can tolerate up through the underwater and ladder sequence, then I can barely sit through the last third of the film. 


I've come to be somewhat neutral toward it but would cry no tears of sorrow if they started remaking the movies and nuked the old franchise for it like I would for the other three films.

Prometheus has drawn my ire of the new lot of films. 

SpreadEagleBeagle

I like A:R as a stand-alone spoof of an Alien film, but it really doesn't fit in or make sense with the rest of the movies. Way too much humor and comedy (albeit dark and morbid as hell) and with cartoony characters and almost slapstick-like scenes. It's like a visually appealing grotesque random fever dream with its own sense of logic, inhabited by a plethora of oddball caricatures.

Whiskeybrewer

Money, money, money money

MONEY!!!

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