Alien: Romulus Director Recalls Getting Pushback From Disney on Shocking Final Scenes

Fede Álvarez saw it as a promising sign that Disney doubted the ending.

By Patrick Cavanaugh

Director Fede Álvarez has delivered audiences some truly horrifying sequences in his career, which is exactly why he delivered such grotesque sequences in the recently released Alien: Romulus. Specifically, the final scenes of the film take the terror to new heights, resulting in those sequences being some of the most talked-about sections of the film. Álvarez recently confirmed that even when execs at The Walt Disney Company just read what he was planning on unleashing, they questioned if it was necessary to push those limits so far, which ultimately inspired him to go even further. Alien: Romulus is in theaters now.

WARNING: Spoilers below for Alien: Romulus

After being fatally injured, Kay (Isabella Merced) injects herself with alien DNA which she expected would heal her. Instead, this modifies her own DNA and she then passes this genetic material to her unborn baby, which ultimately explodes out of her and grows to be a monstrous human/xenomorph hybrid, credited as the "Offspring." As if this wasn't monstrous enough, Kay begins lactating a black goo to provide sustenance for her Offspring.

"If I give you a script and you read it and go, 'Let's do it!' then I feel like I failed. I need the studio to go, 'Are you sure about this? Do you really want to do that?' This is what happens with me and the studios on each one of my movies," Álvarez shared with 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 [with regard to the Offspring], but not because they didn't like it." 

He continued, "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."

Interestingly, even those who weren't entirely familiar with Álvarez's work might have anticipated the movie offering up one last sequence of terror, which has become baked into the formula of most Alien installments.

"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," the director pointed out. "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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Alien: Romulus is in theaters now.

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