10 Sci-Fi Movies That Almost Had Way Better Endings

Dan O’Bannon’s original screenplay for Alien, entitled Starbeast, was an entirely cornier affair than Ridley Scott’s eventual sparse, intense horror adaptation. Scott opted for a darker tone than Return of the Living Dead scribe O’Bannon, eschewing the humour which had been seen in O’Bannon’s earlier work with John Carpenter, 1974’s bizarre sci-fi spoof Dark Star, and aiming instead for a dark, dead serious “haunted house in space” tone for the famous flick.

Did it pay off in the end? Sure, and James Cameron’s sequel Aliens even managed to bring back the more over-the-top grunts featured in O’Bannon’s script without having to jettison the believable strong lead that the character of Ripley represented. So what is there to complain about?

Well for one thing the franchise would go on to put us through Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, and Scott’s own 2012 dud Prometheus, but for the purposes of this list there was only one problem with cutting the more outre elements of O’Bannon’s screenplay.

Two words: Talking Alien.

Yep, before Scott got his hands on the flick, the movie originally ended with the titular xenomorph offing sole survivor Ridley—so far, so scary—then hopping into her escape pod and mimicking her voice to call home.

And thus we missed a talking, spaceship-piloting iteration of the iconic monster forever.