9 Films That Changed Due To Fan Backlash

5. Alien: Covenant

Alien Covenant Xenomorph
Fox

Despite being a sequel to Prometheus, Alien: Covenant is a vastly different film. Where the former is light on Xenomorph action and opted for a more pensive tone, the latter is about as close to a regular Alien movie as we've got since 1979.

As a result of its slower pace and frustratingly hazy connections to the main series, Prometheus divided the fanbase, skewing towards the negative side. Many viewers were expecting a more traditional Alien experience, and were disappointed to discover that Prometheus was anything but.

And so - despite having no plans to include the Xenomorph initially - Ridley Scott brought his famous monster back for the sequel, in an attempt to please the fans he'd burned with his last effort. He even told Yahoo! Movies that he was "wrong" to consider ditching the alien, stating that the Prometheus backlash directly influenced Covenant's production:

"What changed was the reaction to Prometheus, which was a pretty good ground zero reaction... it went straight up there, and we discovered from it that [the fans] were really frustrated. They wanted to see more of the original [monster] and I thought he was definitely cooked, with an orange in his mouth. So I thought: ‘Wow, OK, I’m wrong'".

In the end, Covenant ended up making less than Prometheus did, which must have made Scott wonder why all those angry fans didn't show up at the box-office.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!