As previously mentioned, making the third Alien film was like pulling teeth. But pulling teeth out a xenomorph involves to separate sets of jaws, which just makes it all the more painful and time-consuming. Pitch Black's David Twohy was far from the only screenwriter to be given a shot at making the film work, with Fox apparently contracting everyone and their mother to have a go. One of their more interesting attempts at getting a decent script for Alien 3 saw them bringing William Gibson on board. Whilst only a couple of his screenplays have actually been produced, Gibson is a prolific, popular and influential science fiction writer, creating the subgenre of cyberpunk pretty much single handedly. It's probably the success of Neuromancer and the constant attempts to make it into a film that got Gibson hired to do an Alien 3 script, which he later characterized as "Tarkovskian". His film also shunted Ripley out of the picture, put in a coma, with Hicks and Newt fighting xenomorphs on a spaced-based mall, with the aliens now spreading through an airborne virus that was supposed to be like AIDs.