If it was up to Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley would have been killed off in the first Alien movie.

The director is doing the press rounds for next month’s prequel/sequel Alien: Covenant and he revealed that the franchise could have been drastically altered if he had gotten his way.

Instead of blasting the murderous Xenomorph into space and putting herself and Jones the cat into hypersleep, Scott wanted Ripley to meet her death in the 1979 original.

“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,” he tells EW.

Next, Scott says, he’d have shot a scene with the alien pressing buttons on Ripley’s escape pod. “It would mimic Captain Dallas [Skerritt] saying, ‘I’m signing off.’”

Film execs at 20th Century Fox were none too pleased.

“The first executive from Fox arrived on set within 14 hours, threatening to fire me on the spot,” Scott says. “So we didn’t do that [ending].”

Weaver went on to play Ripley in three sequels and has been linked to a fifth film, which would act as a follow-up to James Cameron’s Aliens.