Sigourney Weaver dropped a rather large bombshell at New York Comic-Con 2025. Alien producer Walter Hill has a potential script to bring back Ellen Ripley to the franchise, and Weaver even met with Disney and 20th Century Studios. Ellen Ripley is easily the most iconic role in Sigourney Weaver’s impressive career, and despite not having appeared as the character since Alien Resurrection 28 years ago, there is still a desire to bring her back.
Maybe 10 years ago, the idea of Sigourney Weaver returning to the Alien franchise might have sounded appealing. Yet now, following the success of both Alien: Romulus and Alien: Earth in introducing fresh new characters, and after nearly a decade of legacy sequels wearing thin, Weaver’s return to Alien feels more exhausting than exciting. Ellen Ripley is great. Sigourney Weaver is great. But the Alien franchise needs to let go of Ellen Ripley moving forward.
Sigourney Weaver’s Return After ‘Aliens’ Was the Franchise’s Original Sin
When making Alien 3, the chairman of 20th Century Fox, Joe Roth, said, “Sigourney Weaver is the centerpiece of the series.” This is what led the creators to bring Weaver back in both Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection, despite Aliens wrapping up her character’s story arc. This was a mistake; the Alien franchise never should have brought Ripley back after Aliens. Bringing Weaver back to her iconic role following Aliens has been the franchise’s original sin that they’ve finally gotten out of.
Aliens was the natural endpoint for Ripley’s story. It resolved her character arc from Alien and ended on an uplifting note. There was no ominous tease or final jump scare; instead, a happy ending as Ripley defeated the monsters who terrorized her and, in the end, found a new surrogate family. Her story was done. The natural point for a sequel would be to follow a new character encountering the Xenomorph. Yet 20th Century Fox didn’t have faith in the Xenomorph as the franchise’s star, as in other horror series. Scripts were written to drag Ellen Ripley back into the action, despite the follow-ups never finding a justifiable reason for her to be included.
Alien 3 immediately undoes the happy ending of Aliens. To force Ripley back into the story, but account for the fact that seven years have passed between the release of Aliens and Alien 3, the film kills off Newt and Hicks off-screen. It is a needlessly cruel development when Alien 3 could have revolved around an original character. Then, even after killing Ripley in Alien 3, Alien Resurrection brings her back in a story set 200 years later through a cloning subplot. Why did that clone have to be Ripley? Why did either film need to revolve around Ripley? Every major issue in both Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection can be traced back to the decision to bring Weaver back as Ellen Ripley instead of allowing the franchise to move forward with new leads, something the franchise has finally started to do to great success.
Legacy Sequels Are Becoming Tiresome
If there is one cinematic trend that has run its course over the past few years, it is the legacy sequel. Whereas remakes of iconic films defined the 2000s and early 2010s, the mid-2010s to the present have been defined by legacy sequels that brought back fan-favorites in classic roles and kept the original films’ continuity. While the foundations of what would become the legacy sequel were laid out in 2010’s Tron: Legacy and 2011’s The Muppets, it was in 2015 that the trend really took hold of popular culture, as that year saw the release of Jurassic World, Terminator Genisys, Creed, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
In the 10 years since, legacy sequels have been relentless. Halloween brought back Jamie Lee Curtis. Terminator: Dark Fate brought back Linda Hamilton. Scream saw Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, and David Arquette return to the franchise. Ghostbusters: Afterlife not only brought back the living cast of 1984, including a cameo by Sigourney Weaver in the end credits, but also reanimated a CGI deepfake of the late, great Harold Ramis. Texas Chainsaw Massacre attempted a legacy sequel without any of the original actors. The trend appeared to have lost its luster as 2023 saw Michael Keaton’s return as Batman in The Flash, Harrison Ford’s fifth Indiana Jones movie, The Dial of Destiny, and Ellen Burstyn’s return in The Exorcist: Believer, all underperforming at the box office.
While there have been some good legacy sequels, like Top Gun: Maverick and Trainspotting 2, for the most part, the trend has run its course and feels like an unwillingness to let these franchises grow and evolve, stuck in a state of arrested development to feed audience nostalgia. The Alien franchise, to its credit, has largely avoided legacy-sequel casting. Part of this is due to the franchise having locked itself out of that route, since Ripley is either in cryosleep through most of the franchise or would be dead in the series timeline. They have certainly had Ripley-inspired characters throughout the series, but they are wholly original characters with their own unique backstories.
‘Alien’ Has Created New, Exciting Characters
Part of the unspoken thing about legacy sequels is that it is a place a franchise turns to when it has run its course and needs to draw audiences back in. Yet the Alien franchise isn’t in that position. In fact, it is at its strongest since 1986’s Aliens. 2024’s Alien: Romulus was a box office hit, making $105 million domestically and $350 million worldwide. Audiences are excited about a sequel, not because of the prospect of seeing Ellen Ripley, but because they’ve grown attached to new characters like Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and Andy (David Johnson).
Then there is Alien: Earth, which just concluded its first season in September 2025. The series is actually a prequel to Alien, with the events taking place two years before the original film. It has expanded the Alien mythology in fascinating ways, not only introducing new corporations beyond Weyland-Yutani but also four new alien lifeforms beyond the Xenomorph, making the universe feel more expansive. The original characters — hybrids that merge a child’s consciousness into an android body — are led by Wendy (Sydney Chadler). They build on the concept of synthetic life introduced in Prometheus in a far more fascinating way. Wendy and her Lost Boy siblings are compelling new characters that have plenty of stories to tell, and the audience seems eager to explore them in future seasons.
In both cases, Alien: Romulus and Alien: Earth knew they couldn’t fall back on the Ellen Ripley character as a crutch. The creators of these two franchise entries had to create new, exciting characters, and it has paid off, as the series now has new leads audiences can follow. The Alien franchise is doing just fine without bringing Sigourney Weaver back, and doing so now would not only appear like a cash grab on a trend that is growing tiresome but also be a repeat of the series’ past mistakes.
Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is one of the greatest movie characters of all time, but that shouldn’t mean the Alien series always needs to return to her. It’s okay for some characters’ stories to end without requiring every actor to reprise their role indefinitely.
- Release Date
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June 22, 1979
- Runtime
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117 Minutes
- Writers
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Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett