12 Movies That Cast MAJOR Actors (Just To Die)

Talking of Prometheus, casting a star name just for them to die is something of a tradition for the Alien franchise. You could even say that this is true of the original, in which Sigourney Weaver was far from the most familiar name at the time and the movie seemed initially to frame Tom Skerritt's captain as the hero.

The Nostromo's captain gets an abundance of attention, though, compared to the captain of the Covenant in the last Alien movie.

James Franco has always been a big star who makes some esoteric choices of material. Even so, taking a role as the ship's captain in a big sci-fi blockbuster, only to go up in flames without waking from cryo-sleep in literally the first scene on the ship, is one of his stranger moves.

In fact, after much of his already brief role was left on the cutting room floor, Franco has the unusual distinction of being a major star who had more screentime in the promotional material than in the entire finished movie.

Promotional short The Last Supper - showing the Covenant's crew just before entering cryo-sleep and actually giving us a sense of Franco's captain as a person and his relationship with the crew (and his wife, the movie's protagonist) - would have made a far better opening scene to the actual movie. That way viewers might have actually cared about Franco's death and its effects.