After watching the excellent Alien: Romulus in theaters last week, it gave me an urge to be able to dive deeper into the Alien franchise while longing for an experience at the Disney Parks. Believe it or not, the dystopian science fiction series actually has quite the connection to Disney, even before they bought 20th Century Fox.
Visitors to Disney’s Hollywood Studios prior to 2017 will no doubt fondly remember The Great Movie Ride, a lengthy attraction which took a slow-moving journey through some of the world’s most iconic films. Just 10 years after debuting in theaters, the original Alien was deemed one of those. After surviving a shoot-out in the Old West, we would enter the spaceship Nostromo – which was dark and eerie, with the iconic alarm sounding throughout. Off to our left, we see an animatronic of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley trying to survive. All of a sudden, we’re attacked from both above and to the side by the iconic Xenomorph.
It was a bold decision at the time to include a movie such as Alien in The Great Movie Ride. But if you’re going to focus on all that makes the movies great, then horror really is a genre to include. I personally remember being pretty terrified of this scene as a kid, long before I had the guts to see the film for myself. I would have to have my parents or grandparents sit on the side, so I wouldn’t be close to the Xenomorph. Even the trailer in the pre-show theater got my heart racing!
Another terrifying attraction at Walt Disney World was the ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter, which was reportedly originally going to feature the Xenomorph and characters from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Disney got cold feet, likely due to the franchise having an R rating and this being the Magic Kingdom. But that really didn’t make much of a difference, as the alien creature created for the attraction was just as terrifying. 30 year old me would have loved to have experienced this attraction, but it was just too much for a single digit aged kid.
Alien would make an absolutely perfect haunted house experience for Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights, and it seems the folks at Universal once agreed – with a house based on Alien vs. Predator coming to the Orlando event in 2014. Sadly, the likelihood of ever getting a house based on the original Alien film is very slim, as Alien is of course part of 20th Century Fox, which is now owned by Universal’s biggest competitor in the theme park space.
Would Disney ever do anything in the theme parks again with Alien? Sadly, I think the answer is no. We have seen Disney make some strides towards including some more mature content in the past, but I think those days are mostly over. Still, I can’t help but long for a time when we were “with Sigourney Weaver aboard the spaceship Nostromo. Something has gone wrong. One by one, the crew has vanished, and somewhere in the ship, a terrifying creature waits to claim its next victim.”