This week, we got treated to a stunning new trailer for the haunted road picture PASSENGER, arriving in movie theaters this May. This trailer is light on plot and heavy on atmospheric scare devices, but director André Øvredal (THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE) has already stated that it doesn’t even feature the best stuff in the movie, which makes me all the more excited for this particular road trip. Let’s gooooo!

Bloody Disgusting caught wind that the man behind the mayhem of the CHUCKY franchise, Don Mancini, is currently working on a new entry made with a return to the cinema screen in mind, not to mention a turn towards something a whole lot scarier. Mancini pulled this off once before, with the creepy dread of CURSE OF CHUCKY, which plays more like a haunted house movie than a slasher. This franchise has an incredible hit-rate, so I’m dialed in to whatever Mancini has up his doll-sized sleeves next.

It’s a miracle anything ever gets made. As a professional writer in the entertainment business, I’ve been through 20+ years of changes, reconceptualizations, and page-one rewrites, so I feel the pain of the development process pretty personally. But then, there’s the development and production of ALIEN³, which, by all accounts, was nothing short of torturous. Initially, there were multiple competing pitches put into the pipeline; then a producer pair decided it would be a great idea to mangle them all into one messy “final” film that 20th Century Fox flung onto movie screens well before it was ready.

As a devotee of the franchise, my anticipation for this film could not have been higher. ALIEN might be my favorite film of all time. The experience of watching ALIENS (the sequel) in a theater (thanks to my older cousins) changed me as a person. It was that foundational. The only trailer I saw for the 1992 threequel was a teaser trailer (watch below). It featured a special shoot with NO ACTUAL MOVIE FOOTAGE and proclaimed that the xenomorphs were finally coming to Earth. So imagine my surprise when I finally saw the movie and … well, that didn’t happen at all.

As you can imagine, Fox execs were chomping at the bit to get a third ALIEN film produced after the incredible success of James Cameron’s Oscar-nominated sequel, commissioning scripts and treatments from the likes of NEUROMANCER author William Gibson (Synthetic-Xenomorphs inside space station) and THE HITCHER director Eric Red (let’s go to the Xenomorph home planet) - but neither got Sigourney Weaver to sign on board. Then, Fox brought David Twohy in to write a non-Ripley-focused story set on a Xenomorph-riddled prison planet that was dead on arrival. After that, New Zealander Vincent Ward pitched a truly unique take: Ripley crashes onto a wooden planet of weaponless space monks who come to view the Alien as a medieval dragon. It was darkly gothic, lacked machine guns (per Weaver’s insistence), and would have been a bold direction for the sci-fi film series to take, but enthusiasm for the screenplay quickly waned.

So when music video and commercial director David Fincher finally entered the picture, ALIEN³ had a locked release date for early summer of 1992 and no locked story. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill feverishly set about combining parts of all the previous scripts and pitches into an acid-dripping monster mash, even though Weaver had disliked every previous iteration. Simultaneously, Fox shipped Fincher off to England’s Pinewood Studios to film on massive sets no one was sure would actually be used on any given day. The English crew gave Fincher the same cold reception and dismissive attitude they initially gave to Cameron during ALIENS, but Cameron had the advantage of also being the screenwriter, married to the on-set producer, and he had all the confidence of, well, James friggin’ Cameron! Fincher, meanwhile, was a man with no country, constantly undermined by daily script rewrites, special effect snafus, and studio interference.

One of my favorite examples of things going wrong was the birthing of the Alien on “Fury” 161. Fincher wanted the Xenomorph to look more like a “puma,” a lithe, four-legged predator that was faster than the previous counterparts. Initially, the Facehugger attaches itself to a dog, but the special effects team had trouble with the birthing sequence, leading to a rather adorable whippet in an alien costume waggling out. This was then replaced by a rod puppet, but pre-CGI, they couldn’t remove the puppeteers from the images. Every solution gave Fincher a whole new set of problems he couldn’t solve with the available time and money.

The end result that hit theaters felt rushed, missing character beats and essential story payoffs. Fincher was crushed and considered leaving moviemaking altogether - but, as we all know, he later found his way to massive creative and box office success. Rumors persisted, however, that there was an “assembly cut” of the movie that made a lot more sense, and, in this case, they proved to be true. Now you can see it for yourself, streaming on HBO Max. Make no mistake, ALIEN³ is still flawed, but this cut gives you a much better sense of the jumbled story.

For me, ALIEN³ shows that a single disappointment doesn’t have to sink your self-worth. We’ve all had an ALIEN³ in our lives, but if we just keep pushing through, eventually we’ll find a “cut” that gives our work new life.

Just one meme that made us laugh this week…