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When you enter a movie called “Alien vs. Predator,” you expect to see two of sci-fi’s greatest monsters duke it out in a no-holds-barred championship match. It’s right there in the name, a cinematic promise of epic proportions. So why does writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2004 adaptation of the Dark Horse Elseworlds-style crossover comic take almost an hour to deliver on its tantalizing promise?
Well, Anderson had a pretty good explanation. In a press junket interview from the time, he stated that while an earlier cut of the film (now streaming on Peacock) did kick off with a brief battle between Xenomorph and Yautja a century before the events the main story, he ultimately decided to remove it in order to harken back to the suspense of Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens (both of which are also streaming on Peacock).
Why Alien vs. Predator holds back on the titular showdown for almost an hour
“I took it out because I thought, ‘Well, this is just giving the whole game away,'” Anderson said. “I preferred the idea that you’ve come to see Alien versus Predator. And like the Cameron movie and Ridley Scott’s movie, you have to wait a long while before you see the creatures.”
For context, Alien doesn’t show the iconic Chestburster until 56 minutes into its nearly two-hour runtime. Aliens, meanwhile, doesn’t feature a baby Xenomorph until a full hour into the 2-hour, 17-minute sequel. Predator continued to up by withholding a proper look at its titular alien until an hour and 19 minutes into an hour and 46-minute runtime. What’s more, Stan Winston’s iconic mandible design gets less than 10 minutes of screen-time.
In addition to building up the anticipation in the vein of those classic movies, Anderson also wanted to follow in their practical footsteps. “I wanted to go back to the look of the movies that Jim Cameron and Ridley Scott had done, where they were mainly working with guys in suits or they were using miniatures — and we did a lot of that,” he said. “That’s not to say there isn’t CG in the movie because there’s a lot of CG, but that would always be our last resort. We’d only resort to CG when we literally couldn’t do anything else.”
He continued: “I think one of the advantages of that, is that rather than having a movie that had 3,000 visual effects shots in it, we managed to make a movie that only had 500 visual effects shots. So we didn’t have to stretch the budget and could really make sure every single one of those shots was fantastic. Because the problem with a movie where you have a broad range of shots, is that you have to accept that some of those are not gonna be particularly good.”
Alien vs. Predator is now streaming on Peacock alongside Alien, Aliens, Predator, and Predators.
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