12 Movie Franchises That Ruined Their Iconic Character

2. Alien (The Xenomorph, The Space Jockey, Ripley, Newt & Hicks)

Well, where to begin with the Alien franchise? The wildly uneven sci-fi horror series began with two first-rate entries before spinning wildly out of control, ruining its numerous beloved characters in the process.

Though the Xenomorph itself was kept fairly in-tact in the first four movies - if we forget Resurrection's horrid hybrid - Newt (Carrie Henn) and Hicks (Michael Biehn) were given a widely-loathed off-screen death in Alien 3, before Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) herself was offed at the end, only to be resurrected with Resurrection's glorified fan fiction clone plot.

And then Prometheus happened, which needlessly lifted the veil on the origins of the eerie Space Jockey, after which Alien: Covenant revealed that the Xenomorphs were the creation of mental android David (Michael Fassbender), contradicting vast aspects of Alien lore in the process.

That's not to ignore Covenant's rendering of the Xenomorph as a repulsive CGI creation, and the truly goofy decision to give audiences a glimpse of how the Xenomorph views the world.

Isn't it so much more interesting if the alien creature remains, well, alien, and its origins stay creepily mysterious? With Covenant bombing at the box office and Ridley Scott claiming he wants to veer away from the titular creature in future films, the Xenomorph is basically dead and buried for the foreseeable future.