10 Deleted Scenes Which Totally Change Classic Films
7. Ripley Loses A Daughter In Aliens
James Cameron haunts this list like the spectral embodiment of the deleted scene. You only need to look at the titanic (snort) length of his movies and the amount of even-more-extended director's cuts he puts out to know that the dude leaves a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor. And, considering the sheer quantity of deleted scenes he's taken out of his blockbuster movies over the year, you just know some of them would have made significant changes to the finished films. Cameron's second directorial effort - after the first Terminator, no less - was Aliens, the action-packed sequel to Ridley Scott's moody sci-fi horror film Alien, and the reason we still remain somewhat excited about this movies even after Avatar.
From the outset Aliens manages to separate itself from the very different tone and directorial tone of the first film by literally separating itself from the first film by a good two hundred years. Having escaped the xenomorph nightmare that saw all of her employees slaughtered on the mining ship Nostromo Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley entered hypersleep, remaining in suspended animation and floating across the universe in her escape pod until she got picked up by some nice folks at Weyland-Yutani.
She freaks out just a tad when she discovers she's missed a couple of decades whilst she was frozen, as we see in the final film, but it turns out she had an even bigger reason to be upset than just having hundreds of seasons of America's Next Top Model to catch up on - unbeknownst to the audience, Ripley actually had a kid back on Earth and, obviously, she's long dead by the time she gets woken up. As if the events of Alien weren't enough to make Ripley a tragic hero, you have to throw in a dead kid she never saw grow up, too. Which might not seem like such a radical change but it actually goes a long way to explaining why she's so protective over Newt, the orphaned girl she basically adopts when she and a bunch of marines get dropped onto an alien-infested planet.