Before David Fincher had been hired to direct Alien 3, Cliffhanger and Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin was originally tapped to direct the film. And in a recent Masterclass Panel at the Mediterrane Film Festival, Harlin discussed the original plans for his Alien 3.

Harlin was on 20th Century Fox’s radar after directing Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which Harlin first discussed during this panel. “I was offered quite a few movies after Nightmare on Elm Street, and Alien 3 became the most interesting of them,” Harlin Explained, “Of course, I admired Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens, and I was thinking, ‘Here’s Renny Harlin, 28 years old, from Finland, and I’m going to follow in the footsteps of these guys?’ So, I made a deal to do the movie for 20th Century Fox.”

Back when Harlin was tapped to direct Alien 3, the original plan was for the film to center on a group of Xenomorphs taking over a prison shift. While this concept later became the basis for David Fincher’s Alien 3, Harlin wasn’t too fond of it at the time. As Harlin explains:

“However, the movie that the studio wanted to make was not at all the movie that I thought we should make. They basically said, ‘We want to make a movie where we are on a prison ship, the aliens come to the prison ship, and the prisoners fight the aliens.’ And I said, ‘Why would anybody care about prisoners on a prison ship in space? What’s unique about that?”

Harlin later explained his two ideas for Alien 3 at this panel. The first would’ve sent a group of Xenomorphs to Earth. “One idea was that the third one would be about the aliens coming to Earth,” explained Harlin, “Already, I’d drawn them a poster of a cornfield where aliens are marching through the cornfield towards a white farmhouse, and the studio said, ‘Nobody’s going to believe in aliens on Earth.’ This was a little before Jurassic Park and movies like that.” His second idea would’ve centered on the Xenomorphs’ origin planet. “Then my other idea was, ‘Let’s go to where the aliens are from,” explained Harlin.

Due to creative differences, Harlin stepped away from directing Alien 3 and was hired to direct Die Hard 2 instead. Interestingly, one of Harlin’s ideas was reincorporated into the recent FX series, Alien: Earth. The full series is streaming on Hulu and Disney+.