The following article was written by Mike Holtz:
This August 13th is the twentieth anniversary of 2004’s Alien vs. Predator, with Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus releasing just a few days later. While we wait for our brown pants to arrive from Amazon for premiere night, we thought it’d be fun to look back at not only the history of the original Alien vs. Predator comic books but also the Alien vs. Predator script that so closely resembled those comic books. The movie that almost was, had the studio decided to go with writer Peter Briggs’s script back in 1991 that we’ll break down for with you today. So with that being said, get to the chopper!
THE ORIGINAL COMIC BOOK SERIES
The result of a late 1980s brainstorming session between executives and creators, Dark Horse Comics Aliens Vs Predator #0 would appear on comic book stands in July of 1990. It’s the kind of “holy sh*t, I’m in!” idea that makes so much sense once you see the alien artifact easter eggs in Predator 2. I mean, you aren’t going to not get Randy Jackson’s autograph on a katana sword.
The original issue would feature two men in a space station having the type of existential one-on-one conversation you would see in a low-budget Richard Linklater film (I’m thinking Tape with Ethan Hawke specifically). Meanwhile, overlaying their idealistic conversation, we see a huge alien queen, strapped down and being forced to produce eggs in a very goopy fashion. This is one of the few ideas that would translate from the comics to both the 2004 film and the script we’re covering today. The images show the queen alien pumping out egg after egg in almost an assembly-line fashion as she squeals in anger before we realize she’s on a Predator spaceship where they are holding her captive and blasting her eggs into space. Then (with Tom and Scott still two-handing all the dialogue) we see a couple of Predators (one of them with a broken tusk) aboard their ship settling an argument in a bloody battle. It’s a neat look into how business gets carried out for those ugly motherf*ckers, and we then see a group of the predators land on one of the same planets they‘d shipped the alien eggs. There, the alien eggs have spawned the always offensive face huggers, which in turn, have inhabited the wildlife and used them as birthing stations for Xenomorphs. We see a Predator face off against a Xenomorph in a swamp, winning the battle, and then being marked by the bigger Predator on his forehead for achieving his first kill. AWWWW it’s so cute!
It is here where we realize that the Predators are populating planets with Xenomorphs solely so that they can hop down there and hunt them. Seems redundant, I know but these Predators REALLY love to hunt. This as you know is also one of the few ideas that in their own way, make it into 2004’s Alien Vs. Predator.
As our story gets going with Aliens Vs. Predator #1, we realize one of these packages-o-doom has made its way into the stratosphere of Planet Ryushi, with a population of 115 human beings and change, along with a whole bunch of Rhino-like creatures called “Rhynths”.
Throughout four issues, the instillation comes face to face with all the horrors of both the Xenomorphs and the Predators. Luckily for them, a few of these folks had earlier come across an injured broken tusk Predator and nursed him back to health. Predators are nothing if not honorable. You have to respect something that tries to kill you, gets its ass kicked, and then high-fives you on its way out the door like it’s proud of you.
Broken Tusk and our lead character Machiko ride out the fight between the Xenomorphs and Predators together Lethal Weapon style. Sort of.
After a wild fight between the Predators, Aliens, and human beings that included an Alien Queen, snuck into the shipment by that sneaky bitch Alien Queen back on the spaceship, Machiko and Broken Tusk are left barely standing. Just before Broken Tusk succumbs to his injuries, he rips off a finger from an alien corpse and marks Machiko with the mark of the warrior. The company declares the installation on Ryushi a write-off, pretends this whole Jurassic Park level f*ck up never happened and moves everyone who survived to a safer place. Machiko though, stays behind and lives off the land, waiting for the next batch of eggs to hunt.
Now, this isn’t the only Alien Vs. Predator story by far. It’s a run that continued in various fashions through 2020. But it is the basis for the script we’re talking about today….Peter Briggs’ Alien Vs. Predator: The Hunt.
THE STORY OF THE SCRIPT THAT NEVER WAS
Somewhere at the dawn of the 90s writer Peter Briggs was working for Paramount UK on Science Fiction ideas and he wasn’t having a lot of success. According to him “nothing I came up with they wanted to do. The crunch came when I suggested Starship Troopers and was considered by Paramount ‘1950’s Heinlein crap”, the next week Tri-Star Pictures picked it up for Paul Verhoeven and you know the rest. Frustrated after almost a year working for Paramount, Briggs came across Aliens Vs. Predator sitting on a stand at Mega City Comics. In what sounds like a lovely afternoon, he scurried over in the rain to The World’s End Pub (which is apparently a real thing I want and need to go to now) and read the comic over a Guinness.
Briggs had decided after reading the monthly issues that he would cherry-pick the best parts of this comic series, turn this into a movie script and try to get it in the hands of the right people. Just like that. Eventually, Peter handed his script to his new representative, Steve Kennis who responded with an understandable “Have you any idea how hard this is going to be to sell?”. Peter wasn’t new to this response, having been teased by friends wondering why the hell he was wasting his time on such an outlandish pipe dream. And I can’t blame them. It’s a feat of great proportion for an unknown writer to get a low-budget original indie film script purchased. Much less two of the most known properties in Science Fiction and Horror colliding in a crossover film Freddy Vs Jason style. Grow up Count Chocula….Peter Pan. And yet, it worked! (Writer’s note here: I am very aware Freddy Vs. Jason didn’t exist yet, but ironically enough, Peter Briggs was also one of the many writers to have his script considered for that film as well).
Briggs was in his garden painting a model of Ripley’s power loader from Aliens when he received a call (in case you’re wondering whether or not he was a fan of the franchise beforehand) from his agent that the script was “the greatest thing” he’d ever read. Then another call a few days later….just like that…his script for Alien VS. Predator was sold to 20th Century Fox and Joe Roth. As Briggs put it in an interview with AVPgalaxy.Net, “People tell you that you can’t do this because you don’t have the rights. Nobody will look at it. It’ll never happen. And it doesn’t. Something like this doesn’t happen and it did happen. It was a billion to one thing and I was very lucky and that was that.”
I will say personally, that this script is damn good. It’s hard to imagine it ever being made due to reasons we’ll discuss going forward…but if a budget wasn’t a thing that existed…Briggs’s script reads like Aliens meets Avatar. It has 90s FOX and James Cameron written all over it. So it wasn’t all luck here. This was a truly good script (which we’ll get into shortly).
But alas, the luck would run out as it so often does in Hollywood. Joe Roth left Fox and Peter Chernin came in and changed an entire development slate, including the plans for their Aliens Vs. Predator film. There was a bit of hope at one point Roland Emmerich who had just directed Universal Soldier could come on board and save the day, but it never materialized. Ironically though, Briggs would later admit he never wrote the script to be made into a film, but rather to get his foot in the door and get a job developing scripts and rewrites for a studio.
Call it what you want to call it, an adaptation, a re-imagining, a fun script that was never meant to be practically made….it’s time to get into the (in my opinion at least) far superior Aliens Vs. Predator script:
ALIENS VS PREDATOR: THE HUNT
The script opens up with a group of Predators well over seven feet tall clinging to a rock where they eventually use their tech to dig a nest tunnel. One of them removes his mask to reveal….wait for it….a broken tusk. The group eventually finds what they are looking for in the form of face huggers and aliens and a battle unfolds. There’s some great imagery in these scenes, including a moment where a Predator shoots an attacking Xenomorph in the face at close range, resulting in the acidic alien blood burning his flesh as we learn that the Predator armor is resistant to the alien blood….but they are not.
The Predators stand victorious after the gnarly battle and return to their mothership where we learn that much like in the comics a Queen Alien is being held captive, making big goopy eggs, that once again the Predators are using to seed planets that they will then go and hunt. Broken Tusk started to feel himself and decided to allow a “Royal Facehugger” on board for more of a challenge. All this tech and these f*ckers could have just had the greatest laser tag games of all time but nooooo, you’ve got to include humans in your sick games!
We see a little more of Predator’s life on their ship including one weird moment where Broken Tusk runs his finger across an Alien skeleton in an erotic fashion…before we learn a little about the place these eggs are being shipped to: Planet Ryushi.
The planet here is quite different from the one in the comics that had been a bright and sunny place. The script describes its Ryushi as “a world where every square mile is covered by a canopy of treetop foliage”. It’s far more of a Floridian swamp or Rainforest than a desert land, which was done on purpose by Briggs, who didn’t have any interest in seeing Xenomorphs in the daylight.
Still, it hosts a small communications outpost of colonists, including our main character, Machiko, who you’ll recognize from the comics. Briggs would later admit he was imagining Tia Carrera in the role or maybe Joan Chen, who again, ironically, ended up playing Lisa in 1995’s Judge Dredd; a film that Briggs also once had a script in the running for. *Briggs had a lot of hopefuls throughout his career and was successfully able to see one of his scripts come to life in 2004’s Hellboy*
The script forgoes a lot of the political positioning aspects of the comic books and gets right in there and gets things moving. The pods open up and begin infecting the wildlife in the area as well as attaching themselves to one of our characters, Ackland, also from the comics. We all know how that turns out.
What’s extremely interesting in the script post-Xeno-transformation is the way the aliens take on the characteristics of their non-humanoid hosts. Including the Rhino-like creatures. This would have created some fascinating-looking aliens of all shapes and sizes; Pure horror everywhere you look; Like a Wal-Mart at 2AM in the deep South. The Predators show up for their fun-hunt and we get some classic Predatorial moments of them doing their invisibility cloaking party tricks and you know, skinning human beings they run into and leaving them dangling in the forest.
Back at the outpost, everything is….how can I put this…royally f*cked. Xenomorphs are coming out of every orifice. Sewer drains, vents, ceilings, floors, you name it. Thanks to a Queen Alien being invited to the party and even spawning an immature Queen Alien as well, they quickly take over and kill all of our Predators except for Broken Tusk, as well as a considerable amount of humans in the most heinous of fashions. The entire outpost is either on fire or submerged in water and like a JoJo Siwa concert in 2024, no one is having a good time.
A plan is devised, led by Machiko, for everyone to escape using these innovative vehicles on sight, one of which being apparently big enough to transport all of the operations center. One aspect that was a little hard to wrap your head around in the script was the vehicles and tech. There are a lot of transport vehicles and technologies that we aren’t privy to mentioned and it’s a little hard to get a visual in your head of just what is going on at times. And my god does this sound expensive! Again….HUGE budget. Hundreds and hundreds of Xenomorphs of all different looks, Queen Aliens, vehicles that sound like a Cyber truck sexed a Transformer and was blown up by Rick Moranis to carry a whole space station…and that’s just the start of it. But damn it’s fun!
Machiko ends up going through a hero’s journey that Ripley herself would be in awe of. The script goes on to calibrate multiple scenes that conjure the video game Alien: Isolation where she must go underwater with almost zero visibility and ends up coming across a hive of Xenomorphs that chase her throughout. After a series of entertaining and death-defying moments with endless amounts of Xenomorphs chasing her down, Broken Tusk shows up and saves her, impressed with what he’s seen so far. This is a little like what we witnessed in the 2004 film, but much more believable here. And let’s pray to God there was no Batman and Robin running moments like this one *Clip*. No offense to Alexa Woods, but Machiko wasn’t just in here talking about “safety protocols”, and getting lucky. She was on her John McClane sh*t.
Broken Tusk uses his dead pals self-destruction device to obliterate most of the remaining aliens and then very much so like what takes place in the comic books, with even some trappings of what we saw in the movie (such as the Predator mimicking the words of his new teammates), the nonstop action ends with Machiko and Broken Tusk crashing their helicopter.
Broken Tusk is severely injured, dripping in green goo, and Machiko engages in a fight with the last remaining Xenomorph attached to their aircraft. Just before she’s overtaken by the creature, Broken Tusk headshots it with a pulse rifle before dying. We see the USCM aircraft arrive just as a Predator spaceship lands.
What’s wild here is that the Predators don’t simply offer their usual high five, or even a trinket from their spaceship like the dentist who lets you pick a treat from the treasure trunk after a good visit….they collect Broken Tusk’s body and actually invite Machiko on board. And what’s even crazier? She accepts! She just walks right in that bad boy and the doors shut behind her as they shoot off into the unknown. Wild! It’s not like the Predators are having ice cream sandwich parties up there….you don’t even know if they have food or human water.
Anyway, it’s a fascinating thought and a really cool way to end a script that I cannot begin to describe to you guys, is so action-packed. If scaled down just a bit to a reasonable size (this was only the first draft however, Briggs believes the second draft may have been lost for good) and helmed by someone like John McTiernan or James Cameron (who would never do it because he hated the idea of Aliens Vs. Predators) or maybe even Roland Emmerich? This could have been an all-time action classic.
I can’t say it enough, this thing reads like a James Cameron epic. Predators diving onto Helicopters, Aliens by the hundreds, death and dismemberment by the bucket. I wish we could see this movie. But this is the next best thing and I hope you enjoyed it! The script in its entirety can be found online and so can more videos from JoBlo like this one! Thanks for spending some of your time with us today. Bye!