James Cameron’s pitch for Aliens is now the stuff of Hollywood legend. In the early 1980s, 20th Century Fox was keen to get the ball rolling on a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien. At this point James Cameron was an up-and-coming director whose screenplay for The Terminator was floating around Hollywood, and he was invited to provide a treatment for Alien II. During a later pitch meeting with studio executives, he supposedly wrote the word Alien on the back page of his screenplay, before adding a letter S and drawing two lines through it to make a dollar sign: Alien$. This supposedly convinced Fox that he had the right vision to deliver a blockbuster hit, and the rest is history.
Well, kind of. Cameron has confirmed that this much-repeated anecdote involving a dollar sign did indeed take place, but the development process behind Aliens wasn’t exactly smooth sailing. This story condenses a long journey down to a single moment of dynamite salesmanship. In reality it took a few years for the studio to accept Cameron’s pitch, not least because he didn’t have a big hit of his own until The Terminator came out in 1984.
