James Cameron’s Aliens is my favorite film in the franchise. That movie was just so freakin’ badass! Of course, I love Ridley Scott’s original film, but sitting in a movie theater when I was a kid, watching Aliens was one of the coolest movie-going experiences of my life. It was also the first R-rated movie that I was allowed to see, and I loved every single second of it!
Anyway, it’s always fun learning new things about your favorite movies and I recently came across the story of how Cameron sold his Aliens movie idea to Fox, and I thought I’d share that with you in case you didn’t know!
Cameron was just coming off The Terminator when the opportunity to build the Alien franchise came to him. With Alien being a horror film, Cameron was now looking to make a Xenomorph war film. When the filmmaker pitched his idea to the studio, the whole selling point came to Cameron breaking down to the title, Aliens. He then sold his idea by turning the “s” in Aliens into a dollar sign. He confirmed this was true in an interview with CinemaBlend, saying:
“Yeah, it’s true. It just popped into my mind in the moment. It was actually on the back of a script, or some kind of presentation document. And it might’ve been the treatment. I can’t remember. I was sitting with the three producers, and we were in the office of the then-head of 20th Century Fox. And I said, ‘Guys, I got an idea for the title. It goes like this.’ And I wrote, Alien in large block letters. And I put an “s” on the end.
I showed it to them. I said, ‘I want to call it Aliens because we’re not dealing with one. Now we’re dealing with an army, and that’s the big distinction. And it’s very simple and very graphic.’ I said, ‘But here’s what it’s going to translate to.’ And then I drew the two lines through it to make it a dollar sign. That was my pitch. And apparently, it worked! Because they went with the title. They never questioned it.”
Aliens ended up being a huge hit and ended up earning $131 million worldwide at the box office, which was a big deal in the 80s! Sometimes I think how fun and cool it would be to be in the room when stuff like this happens.