‘Alien: Romulus’ director Fede Álvarez got pushback from Disney for the movie’s final horrifying scene.
Fede Alvarez has described how the final scene of Alien: Romulus didn't go down well with Disney
In the sequence, a fatally injured Kay (Isabella Merced) injects herself with Xenomorph DNA in an attempt to cure herself, but the genetic material is passed on to her unborn baby, which creates a human/alien hybrid - known as the ‘Offspring’ - which viciously bursts out of her stomach and begins feeding from the terrified space explorer and the filmmaker has now revealed the studio was initially hesitant to allow the scene because executives thought it could be "too much" for viewers to stomach.
He told The Hollywood Reporter: "They asked me about many things in ‘Don’t Breathe’ and the blood rain in ‘Evil Dead’ and were like, ‘How can we even do that? How are we going to do all that stuff?’
"So when I get pushback, that’s really when I go, ‘Okay, that's good. We’re on track. The studio is pushing back on it.’ And they did [push back] at the beginning [regarding the ‘Offspring’], but not because they didn’t like it.
"They just thought, ’Is it too much? Do we really have to go there?’And I was like, ‘Yeah, now that you said that we shouldn’t, I know that I will.'
"So that's exactly what we did here. If you’re given an ‘Alien’ movie by a corporation that is owned by Disney and they immediately say, ‘Yeah, let's make it,’ then you are failing somehow. So we really pushed it to the limit, and I'm glad we did."
The director - who wrote the movie with Rodo Sayagues - added that his style of bringing a "fourth act" to a film fits well with the horror/sci-fi franchise and pointed to previous entries in the ‘Alien’ series that included an unexpected additional sequence after audiences are led to believe the story had concluded.
He explained: "All my movies have a fourth act. It's the way we write. There's a moment where the movie feels like it's over, and then there's a fourth act, which is fitting because ‘Alien’ has a fourth act as well.
"You could even argue that ‘Aliens’ has a bit of a fourth act with its last set piece. It's when you think it's all done and the movie could have ended, but it just gives you a last set piece that tends to go to really extreme places."
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