Battle of the beasts
For more than a decade, filmmaker Paul W.S. Anderson felt compelled to write and direct “Alien Vs. Predator.” It took 20th Century Fox and the film’s many producers almost as long to share his passion.
After several false starts, a studio management shakeup, years of negotiations between feuding producers, a near derailment by a fifth “Alien” movie, and a last-minute assist from another studio’s hit slasher film, Anderson finally got his wish, and his resulting “AVP” debuts today.
“It took a long time to try to figure out how to make it work,” producer John Davis says.
Yet “AVP’s” road to movie theaters has proved as perilous as an abandoned spacecraft, and in an unusually defensive step, Fox decided not to show its nearly $70 million investment to critics before its release.
Look in coming InLife pages and online at www.spokane7.com for a full review.
Even without critics getting the first crack, “AVP” can deliver plenty to Fox. Combining two of Fox’s best-known science fiction titles, the film seems a natural fit for today’s craving for recognizable franchises. An Alien skull made a cameo in 1990’s “Predator 2,” and the Predator and Alien creatures started dueling years ago in popular video games and comic books.
The film can take advantage of the “Alien” and “Predator” name recognition to launch not only itself but also, if it sells bushels of tickets, potential sequels.
“The advantage we have over a ‘Batman vs. Superman’ or even a ‘Freddy vs. Jason’ is that we are dealing with a species,” Anderson says. “There’s only one Batman, and one Super-Man, and Warners is not going to kill one of its franchises off.”
What sounds like an obvious no-brainer, though, wasn’t so easy when it came to bringing “AVP” to life.
In numerous pitch meetings with the studio and producer Davis, a series of screenwriters pitched so many versions that the Writers Guild of America spent four months sorting out the “AVP” screenplay credits (Anderson has sole screenplay credit, with story by Anderson, Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett).
Anderson had attended the 1994 Sundance Film Festival with his low-budget drama “Shopping.” While making the rounds in Park City, Utah, Anderson encountered a young Fox studio executive and promptly pitched him his idea for an “Alien vs. Predator” story.
The executive, Peter Rice, now runs the studio’s specialty division, Fox Searchlight. Even so, Anderson’s idea went nowhere.
“No one was ever going to give that kind of movie to me to make,” Anderson says. The British director went on to make such popular genre films as “Mortal Kombat,” “Event Horizon” and “Resident Evil.” Yet he never stopped thinking about “AVP.”
Anderson was finally summoned to Fox’s Century City studios, where he pitched Parker his idea. To help tell the story, in which present-day scientists unearth a creature-on-creature battleground deep inside an Antarctic pyramid, Anderson shelled out thousands of dollars of his own money on five giant “AVP” conceptual illustrations.
“We really liked his approach and what he had to say about the movie,” Parker says. “It felt like a perfect end-of-the summer picture. It all felt right.”
Ridley Scott, who directed the first “Alien” in 1979, and James Cameron, who directed 1986’s sequel, “Aliens,” considered joining forces for one more “Alien” production. When nothing happened, “AVP” was back on track.
Fox initially didn’t want to spend much more than $40 million on the movie, which Anderson and Davis thought would be ruinously cheap.
But then New Line’s lightly regarded “Freddy Vs. Jason” opened to a stunning first weekend of $36.4 million.
“You often need one last push to get a movie over the top,” Davis says. “I won’t say that (‘Freddy Vs. Jason’) was the deciding factor, but any help you can get” is critical.