Why Joss Whedon’s Original Endings For Alien: Resurrection Never Made The Cut
By Joshua Meyer/March 2, 2022 10:54 am EST
In “Alien Resurrection,” we do get a view of Earth at the end, as Ellen Ripley’s clone (Sigourney Weaver), the synthetic being Call (Winona Ryder), and the other surviving crew members of the Betty ship enter the planet’s atmosphere. The ship flies in over the clouds and Call asks Ripley, “What happens now?” To which Ripley replies, “I don’t know, I’m a stranger here myself.”
A much different ending
According to Den of Geek, Whedon’s first draft of “Alien Resurrection” has the Betty crash-landing in a forest, which becomes the setting for a fight between Ripley, Call, and the skull-faced human-Xenomorph hybrid, the Newborn. Ripley wields a grenade launcher and Call drives a flying harvester with threshing teeth. After that, Whedon rewrote the ending several times, with the final earthbound version shifting to a desert location. As he explained:
“The first [version] was in the forest with the flying threshing machine. The second one was in a futuristic junkyard. The third one was in a maternity ward. And the fourth one was in the desert. Now at this point this had become about money, and I said, ‘You know, the desert looks like Mars. That’s not Earth; that’s not going to give people that juice.’ But I still wrote them the best ending I could that took place in the desert.”
Whedon was dead set on an Earth finale because he felt, “The reason people are here is we’re going to do the thing we’ve never done; we’re gonna go to Earth.” However, the aforementioned budgetary concerns led to the abandonment of this and other ideas in the movie. What’s left is a film that the screenwriter was unhappy with and that came in dead last in our ranking of the “Alien” movies.
In the intervening years since “Alien Resurrection,” Whedon’s career has itself crash-landed due to accusations of workplace harassment on the set of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Justice League.” It’s tough to say whether an earthbound ending for “Alien Resurrection” could have really redeemed the rest of the movie that came before it, but it would at least have given fans something they had never seen before.
Whedon was dead set on an Earth finale because he felt, “The reason people are here is we’re going to do the thing we’ve never done; we’re gonna go to Earth.” However, the aforementioned budgetary concerns led to the abandonment of this and other ideas in the movie. What’s left is a film that the screenwriter was unhappy with and that came in dead last in our ranking of the “Alien” movies.
“The first [version] was in the forest with the flying threshing machine. The second one was in a futuristic junkyard. The third one was in a maternity ward. And the fourth one was in the desert. Now at this point this had become about money, and I said, ‘You know, the desert looks like Mars. That’s not Earth; that’s not going to give people that juice.’ But I still wrote them the best ending I could that took place in the desert.”
In the intervening years since “Alien Resurrection,” Whedon’s career has itself crash-landed due to accusations of workplace harassment on the set of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Justice League.” It’s tough to say whether an earthbound ending for “Alien Resurrection” could have really redeemed the rest of the movie that came before it, but it would at least have given fans something they had never seen before.
