Steven Spielberg’s Aliens Pitch Is Terrible

The E.T. director met a young James Cameron in the early ’80s and gave him a horrible piece of advice. Steven Spielberg suggested that Cameron, who was writing Aliens at the time, make the sequel about a “misunderstood,” xenomorph being hunted by cruel humans. Thank god Cameron didn’t listen.

Steven Spielberg dropped the Aliens bombshell during a Directors Guild of America event in 2011. The director was reminiscing with Cameron about his ’80s anthology Amazing Stories when he mentioned the Aliens anecdote. “That’s right,” Cameron said, remembering the exchange.

“We met, and I was just about to go do Aliens—or I was writing Aliens—and we were talking about Amazing Stories, and you said, ‘Oh, I know what to do! I know what to do! Because in the first Alien, the alien was bad, so in this one, have the alien be misunderstood, and the humans are trying to kill it, and it’s running around the ship,” recalled Cameron.

“Thank goodness you didn’t do that,” Spielberg remarked. And he’s right; a sympathetic xenomorph would have gone over with fans like a lead balloon. Steven Spielberg failed to grasp that, unlike his aliens, the xenomorphs were designed to be pants-soilingly terrifying. A scene with one of the eyeless horrors holding up a single, slime-coated claw while muttering, “Ripley phone home!” just wouldn’t work.

You could argue that James Cameron eventually took the other director’s advice. Steven Spielberg’s “good alien” pitch didn’t fit Aliens, but it worked like gangbusters for Terminator 2. We’re not suggesting that James Cameron based Arnold’s nice guy Terminator on Spielberg’s idea…

But we can’t disprove it either.

Hollywood never throws out an idea. If an exciting concept doesn’t fit one project, the industry reworks it until it works elsewhere. Infamous producer Jon Peters reportedly insisted on putting a giant spider in Tim Burton’s ill-fated Superman Lives project. When that project failed, Peters snuck his giant spider into the climax of 1999’s Wild Wild West instead.

Technically, Cameron used Steven Spielberg’s suggestion in Aliens, just not with a xenomorph. Alien features an evil android named Ash who tries to murder Ripley in one of the movie’s tensest scenes. James Cameron flipped the script for Aliens and gave us Bishop—a heroic android who saves Ripley’s life more than a few times.

Again, we have no idea if Spielberg’s pitch actually inspired that idea, but there’s no real reason to think it didn’t.

Whether Cameron held onto Steven Spielberg’s words or not, the important thing is that he didn’t put a sympathetic xenomorph in Aliens. Doing so would have changed the course of cinema history in ways we shudder to think about. Just imagine an Alien 3 where Ripley and her xenomorph besty fly around the galaxy, solving crimes.

The promotional material would read something like, “They called him a monster. She called him a friend. From first-time director, David Fincher comes Xeno and Rips, a new species of buddy cop comedy guaranteed to put a smile on both your mouths!”

Okay, on second thought, that sounds awesome. Maybe Steven Spielberg was onto something with his “misunderstood,” alien idea.