Ridley Scott recently reflected on his six-decade career in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter and shared regret about some of his past business deals.
He explained, “I made ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner,’ but then I moved on. I should’ve locked them up — as [Steven] Spielberg would have with ‘Jurassic Park,’ and everything he does, and [James] Cameron has done. Studios paid for them, but there’s a way of locking yourself into [ownership] during the negotiation.”
Scott directed the original ‘Alien’ in 1979 and returned to the franchise with ‘Prometheus’ in 2012 and ‘Alien: Covenant’ in 2017. He noted, “I watched ‘Alien 2,’ ‘3’ and ‘4’ and realized, ‘Oh, you just ran that firmly into the ground.’ Then, I went back to [former 20th Century Fox chief Tom Rothman] and said, ‘Listen, there’s a way out. We should resurrect ‘Alien’ with ‘Prometheus.’’ They made half a billion dollars — by now probably a billion with all the resales. It’s not what happens at the box office, it’s what happens after the box office.”
“Then, I went back with ‘Alien: Covenant,’ and that was big and ambitious and maybe too intellectual to play as well. It still did $250 million, and I still stupidly didn’t lock it up. I don’t blame me, because I’m busy. I blame a couple other people, which is why we parted company.”
The director most recently served as a producer for ‘Alien: Romulus’ along with Michael Pruss and Walter Hill of Brandywine Productions. Directed by Fede Álvarez, the movie made over $350 million on an $80 million budget last summer.
Now, Scott’s future with the ‘Alien’ series in unclear, but Scott Free president and COO Justin Alvarado Brown is sure that future projects will not move forward without them. “It would make no sense that another movie is made without Ridley and us,” Brown previously told THR.
Besides ‘Alien,’ Scott is busy with other projects. A sequel to 2000’s ‘Gladiator’ is waiting for a late November release while he’s producing the Amazon Prime series ‘Blade Runner 2099,’ with Michael Green, Broderick Johnson, and Andrew Kosove.
