12 Crazy Sequel Pitches That Almost Ruined Great Films
8. John Fasano's Alien 3 (The One With The Wooden Planet)
There are few films that tick the too many cooks box quite as appropriately as Alien 3, and while the bloated final product that was eventually released was a mess compared to the first two, we could have had much, much worse.
Somewhere in the middle of the film's developmental hell, New Zealand director Vincent Ward was hired to make an Alien sequel that would include Sigourney Weaver, and he almost oversaw the creation of a number of different projects including an offering by David Twohy that was basically Pitch Black in different clothes. Ward didn't like Twohy's version, but instead of telling him that directly, he pushed ahead with writing an alternate with John Fasano, based on his own desire to set the film in a monastery, while insisting to Twohy that they were actually writing Alien 4.
Together Ward and Fasano wrote what would infamously become known as the Wooden Monastery Film, which was set on a wooden satellite (because such things are easily explained) full of pious, and sexually frustrated monks. Some have said that the planet would have made the film visionary and cool, but who wants to watch a group of monks try not to have sex with Ripley while enduring what they see as a religious trial (the xenomorph)?
The law of sequels always required the group of victims in Alien 3 to be at least as bad-!*$% as those in Aliens, and though the inmates of Alien 3 ultimately failed in that endeavour, a group of misguided monks would have been even more like walking, praying fodder. And crucially, there would be very little pleasure in seeing them dispatched by the creature.