Alien director Ridley Scott reveals film’s shocking original ending

ALIEN director Ridley Scott has revealed the film nearly had an ending so bizarre that studio heads threatened to fire him unless he changed it.

SOME 35 years after it was released, director Ridley Scott has revealed he had a very different ending in mind for the iconic film Alien.

The science fiction horror film, which launched a franchise that will continue this year with sixth instalment Alien: Covenant, marked the first big screen lead role for Sigourney Weaver. Her character, the tough-as-nails, alien-torching Ellen Ripley, appears in a further three Alien sequels — but if Scott had it his way, she would’ve met a grisly end during the first film’s climax.

Alien ends with Ripley finally defeating the ‘xenomorph’ alien after a fierce battle, then recording one last log entry before shutting herself into a pod for hypersleep.

Sigourney Weaver and Tom Skerritt in Alien.

“I thought that the alien should come in, and Ripley harpoons it and it makes no difference, so it slams through her mask and rips her head off,” Scott says in an new interview with Entertainment Weekly.

A gloomy end for an iconic action hero, and Scott’s next suggestion would’ve made for a truly bizarre finish: He planned that the film would still close with a captain’s log recording — recorded by the alien itself.

Scott said the final shots of the film would show the alien, alone on the spacecraft having killed the whole crew, pressing buttons on the console with its tentacles.

“It would mimic Captain Dallas [Tom Skerritt] saying, ‘I’m signing off’.”

Ridley Scott with actor Sigourney Weaver on set of Alien. After studio intervention, Ellen Ripley lived to see another day. Picture: Robert PennSupplied

It’s unclear how exactly the alien would’ve learned to operate the console during the events of the film — or how it had picked up the power of human speech.

Scott said he could still recall the frosty reception when he phoned the studio heads at 20th Century Fox during filming to explain his plan for the film’s ending.

“The first executive from Fox arrived on set within 14 hours, threatening to fire me on the spot,” he said.

“So we didn’t do that [ending].”

Originally published as Alien director Ridley Scott reveals film’s shocking original ending