10 Abandoned Scripts Better Than The Finished Movie

10. Alien 3

The history of the production, scripting and marketing surrounding the third entry in the Alien franchise serves as a word of warning about truth in marketing and the importance of forethought. Not only were ads running before a script was finished, advertising that the xenomorphs have finally entered our atmosphere, but the finished product didn't even approach earth.

There are several abandoned drafts of Alien 3, possibly the most famous being sci-fi writer William Gibson's contribution. Gibson worked enthusiastically finished a drafted that hewed closely to David Giler and Walter Hill's initial ideas; an action-oriented script that focused on Michael Biehn's Hicks from the previous film and the notion of the evil Weyland-Yutani company breeding xenomorphs as bio-weapons. So popular was Gibson's draft that it has been adapted into a graphic novel.

After the writer's strike, Gibson was asked to make rewrites but instead walked away from the project, frustrated with producers stalling. The project passed to horror writer Eric Red, who was rushed and focused the action of his draft on a bio-dome-in-space environment meant to ape small town America. He disowned the draft.

There were other drafts, each incorporating ideas from the previous and also pulling away from other aspects, until somehow we were left with a script set on a monastery-like planet made of wood that mistakes the alien for Satan and Ripley as its harbinger.

This was eventually changed into an ultra-religious, weaponless prison planet, and with a director in a young David Fincher, Fox set about shooting the unfinished script, writing it along the way.