With spoilers, director Fede Alvarez has talked about a possible Alien: Romulus sequel, and Disney’s initial nervousness over his movie’s ending.
NB: This is your final warning for Alien: Romulus spoilers. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, why not read our spoiler-free review?
Having made $108m on its opening weekend, and seemingly set to remain at the number one spot in several territories at the end of this week, the decision to put Alien: Romulus in cinemas rather than on a streaming service has certainly paid off for Disney.
There was at least one aspect of Fede Alvarez's space horror that made some higher-ups at Disney a little nervous, however. As the filmmaker recently told The Hollywood Reporter (via Bloody Disgusting), the film’s ending, in which Isabella Merced’s Kay gives birth to a freakish human-xenomorph-Engineer hybrid, received a certain amount of pushback from Alvarez’s corporate overlords.
“They did [push back] at the beginning,” Alvarez said, “but not because they didn’t like it. They just thought, ‘Is it too much?’ Do we really have to go there?’ And I saw like, ‘Yeah, now that you said that we shouldn’t, I know that I will.’ So that’s exactly what we did there.”
Read more: Alien: Romulus | With spoilers, an exploration of its twists and shocks
Alvarez added that he’d had similar experiences with his earlier movies, with the somewhat extreme final reels of Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe evoking their own trepidation among their respective studio heads.
“They asked me about many things in Don’t Breathe and the blood rain in Evil Dead and were like, ‘How can we even do that? Are we going to do all that stuff?’ So when I get pushback, that’s really when I go, ‘Okay, that’s good. We’re on track.'”
Besides, Alvarez seems to have taken a certain amount of glee in seeing what he could get away with under the Disney banner. “If you’re given an Alien movie by a corporation that is owned by Disney,” he said, “and they immediately say, ‘Yeah, let’s make it,’ then you’re failing somehow. So we really pushed it to the limit, and I’m glad we did.”
Alien: Romulus’s bloody conclusion also left a few threads open for a potential sequel; Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and an injured but functional Andy (David Jonsson) are in hypersleep, heading for what they hope will be a happier life on the planet Yvaga.
Read more: Alien: Romulus and 45 years of fascinating androids
Alvarez has previously been a little vague about making an Alien: Romulus sequel (“I don’t really know,” he said in a June Q&A), but if he were to make one, then he and co-writer Rodo Sayagues have at least one idea for what might happen.
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Said Alvarez, “Once we finished, we started thinking, ‘What do you think happens when or if they get to Yvaga? Is it going to be great? Or is it a terrible place?’
“We tend to believe it’s probably a terrible place that they think is great and fantasise about, so we naturally started thinking about where it goes and what’s going to happen. And then, a few minutes in, we go, ‘Oh, that sounds like a sequel.'”
The director also pointed out that Yvaga means ‘paradise’ in Guarani, so having the planet turn out to be the exact opposite would certainly be in keeping with the Alien franchise’s bleak outlook.
There’s also those samples of the Z-01 mutagen which are potentially still aboard Rain and Andy’s ship, the Corbelan IV. As we’ve seen in previous movies, the xenomorph always finds some way to survive.
Alien: Romulus is in cinemas now.
