8 Cinematic Universes That Existed Before Marvel's

2. Alien Vs. Predator

When does an easter egg become more than just an easter egg? When it becomes the basis for an entire subseries, that's when. In Predator 2, one of the skulls in the LA-ravaging Yautja's ship is from a xenomorph of Alien fame. Little more than a cool shout out to the comic that pitted the two properties against each other from a year earlier, it snowballed; with real, genuine movie endorsement the graphic novel franchise evolved into books and video games and, eventually, a full-on versus movie. Suddenly Alien (which already consisted of four tonally distinct films) and the more conventional action-sci-fi mash-up of Predator existed in the same world, with a convoluted backstory engineered that linked them and two (two!) rubbish movies pitting them together made. Perhaps the worst thing it did was torpedo what could have been an awesome Alien 5; Ridley Scott wanted to make a cerebral, quasi-origin story to Alien in the tailend of the nineties, but couldn't get it to fly due to Fox's insistence of the crossover. The whole thing amounted to a waste of time and is pretty much ignored by both now-separate franchises going forward (Scott's Alien 5 became Prometheus, which overwrote everything in the previous two movies), but there's no mistaking its importance in showing how two series could be brought together to financial success