10 Movies That Tried To Exploit Nostalgia (And Failed)

10. Alien: Covenant

Prometheus, Ridley Scott's technically-but-not-quite Alien movie, turned out to be hugely divisive. Some fans loved the detailed world-building and incredible production design, while others criticized it for being a little too grandiose and failing to fully explore or develop many of the lofty philosophical ideas hinted at in the script.

Regardless, it made $403.4m at the box office and in this day and age, that pretty much guarantees a sequel.

Perhaps sensing the backlash, the decision was made to abandon the majority of the story threads established in Prometheus in favor of steering things back towards more recognizable territory, with the 'Alien' prefix now added to the title and the iconic Xenomorphs brought back and placed front-and-center in the marketing to make things even clearer.

Covenant isn't a bad movie by any means, but it feels as though there was a studio-mandated checklist of things that had to be included to make it feel like an Alien movie, and instead of bringing anything new to the table these moments just trigger your nostalgia for the first two installments and remind you that you've seen all of this before.

Awkwardly bolting the franchise's existing mythology onto the lore established in Prometheus makes Alien: Covenant an incredibly uneven and over-familiar movie, and it ultimately only earned a little over half as much as its predecessor at the box office, leaving the future of the 40 year-old series up in the air yet again.