Predator shouldn’t exist? James Cameron was in serious talks to do a fifth Alien film, but once he heard AVP was in production, he dropped the whole thing, saying it would, “kill the validity of the franchise. it’d be Frankenstein meets Werewolf.” (His initial idea ultimately became Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.) A monster mash might not have been Cameron's style, but it definitely was Paul W.S. Why was it a big deal at the time? The best argument why Alien vs. The surprise, honestly, is that it took them that long to make it.
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It came out on Aug. 13, 2004, 16 years ago. Predator, which, in many ways, feels like the distillation of the internet at that period - two intense, nostalgia-driven fanbases finally getting their wish: They found out whether or not their dad can beat up your dad. The apex of this trend, or its nadir, depending on your perspective, is 2004’s Alien vs. Last time I looked, Mike Tyson was fighting a darned shark. Eventually, Freddy was fighting Jason and Batman was fighting Superman and it was mass chaos.
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But, this trend of pitting monsters and bad guys against each other couldn’t help but supersize in the world of internet fandom, where everybody’s inherent polarized nature has them lining up in the corners declaring that their guy is better than your guy. Two titans facing off has been a staple of genre filmmaking for decades King Kong was fighting Godzilla in the early 1960s and Universal was pitting its classic monsters against one another two decades before that. It is human nature - though, to be fair, foremost the nature of 12-year-old prepubescent boys - to see two formidable figures and immediately think, “Let’s make them fight!” Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world’s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.