William Gibson’s Alien 3 Script Would Have Made A Better Movie

David Fincher’s Alien 3, didn’t get much love when it came out, earning just a 44% on Rotten Tomatoes. While it’s certainly not as bad as Alien: Resurrection, most Alien fans still find it an underwhelming and ultimately unsatisfying addition to the series, ranking third out of the first four films in most Alien rankings.

Back in 1986, after the success of Alien and Aliens, writers and directors were vying for the chance to continue the Alien series, coming up with scripts and ideas for the next big film. One such script was written by William S. Gibson, an author and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction sub-genre known as cyberpunk.

Later adapted into the comic series Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by Dark Horse Comics in 2018, most fans will likely know it from the Audible audio drama Alien III, which was directed by Dirk Maggs in 2019 and starred Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen. A significantly more action-packed story focusing on the aftermath of Aliens, Gibson’s Alien III follows Corporal Hicks and Bishop as they battle genetically-altered xenomorphs aboard a space station.

Why William Gibson’s Alien 3 Would Have Been a Better Movie

Alien 3 famously went through numerous iterations with several different writers and directors rotating out until the final picture was completed. When 20th Century Fox executives gave the greenlight for the film concept—originally intended to show Weyland-Yutani facing off against a space version of the Soviet Union–the first writer that producers Giler and Hill approached was William S. Gibson.

Gibson’s script, heavily inspired by the first two Alien films, follows Corporal Hicks and the newly repaired Bishop as they have to fight off a swarm of xenomorphs. The space station Anchorpoint is slowly being infested after both the scientists there and from the Union of Progressive Peoples (UPP) have been experimenting with xenomorph tissue samples they retrieved from Bishop’s body. The script ends with a teaser for the fourth film, indicating that the humans are now united against a common enemy and will have to track the creatures to their source and destroy them.

Producers, however, were unimpressed with Gibson’s script. Giler described it in the documentary Wreckage and Rage: The Making of Alien 3 as “a perfectly executed script that wasn’t all that interesting“. Particularly, they felt that the script didn’t take enough risks or differ enough in tone from the first two films. The producers asked Gibson to do a rewrite, which he did, altering the tone of his story to be more claustrophobic and similar to the original Alien, but this was also rejected.

Ultimately, the studio decided to take Alien 3 in a much different direction, going through a variety of scripts written by Eric Red, David Twohy, and Vincent Ward and John Fasano. Gibson’s script started gaining fame online, as fans excitedly devoured the alternate Alien 3 story until—as part of Alien’s 40th Anniversary celebration—the audio drama version was released on Audible. The script is a departure from Gibson’s usual style, leaving behind some of the wackier cyberpunk concepts his fans might expect, but it clearly shows a focus on the styles of Ridley Scott, Dan O’Bannon, and James Cameron. This is one of the major reasons why it worked so well as an addition to the series, and why fans were so willing to embrace it.

After the heart-pounding terror of Ridley Scott’s Alien and the gripping action sequences in David Cameron’s Aliens, David Fincher’s Alien 3 was just a moody, anticlimactic film that unceremoniously killed two main characters off-screen in the first five minutes of the film.

Gibson’s script has given life to a new storyline where Hicks gets to live out his potential, Ripley steps back, and a new xenomorph variant appears as they become even more deadly. It’s clear from the fan response to Gibson’s script as well as the comics and audio drama that came from it that Gibson’s Alien 3 would have been a much more satisfying addition to the series.

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