If the concept sounds a bit like Alien meets Blade Runner, this might be because the concept surfaced around the time Ridley Scott was being courted to return as director. Unfortunately for Fox, Scott was already embroiled in a number of projects in the late ’80s – he’d just completed the thriller Someone to Watch Over Me (1987), and was preparing to film Black Rain (1989) and road-trip drama Thelma And Louise (1991).

Two Sequels, and a Screenplay by William Gibson

In one early concept, Giler and Hill envisioned a story which would take place over two films. In the first, Michael Biehn would take the lead as Hicks while Ripley would spend the entirety of the story in hypersleep and Newt would be sent back to the safety of Earth. The second film would have seen Ripley revived for another fight with her mortal enemy, the aliens.

Although Giler and Hill’s specific plans for Alien 4 remain hazy, their ideas for Alien 3 were explored at length, with famed sci-fi writer William Gibson hired to write two drafts of the script.

Gibson’s version of the story sees the Sulaco picked up by an insular colony of people calling themselves The Union of Progressive Peoples. A communist group locked in a cold war with Weyland-Yutani, the UPP live on a remote station “the size of a small moon.” Having boarded the Sulaco, the UPP find and capture the damaged remains of Bishop, before sending the ship on its way when they’re attacked by a facehugger hidden in Bishop’s hypersleep chamber.

The Sulaco is subsequently brought back to Anchorpoint, an outpost in an area of space owned by Weyland-Yutani. Hicks is awakened to learn that he’s in the middle of a diplomatic crisis: the Sulaco‘s brief presence in UPP-controlled space being enough, it seems, to trigger the spectre of all-out war. Meanwhile, the seemingly omnipresent alien is about to introduce some complications of its own, as the UPP have acquired xenomorph DNA and recognize that it could be turned into a deadly weapon.