In his interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Ridley Scott notes while he returned to the franchise for its prequels, 20th Century Fox never called him when the time came to do “Aliens.” “I was such a tough guy when I was doing it they didn’t want me back,” he told THR.

One of the appeals of prequels like “Alien: Covenant” was it afforded Scott to play with the formula, rather than flogging a dead Facehugger:

“I think ‘Alien vs. Predator’ was a daft idea. And I’m not sure it did very well or not, I don’t know. But it somehow brought down the beast. And I said to them, ‘Listen, you can resurrect this, but we have to go back to scratch and go to a prequel, if you like.’ So we go to Prometheus, which was not bad actually. But you know, there’s no alien in it, except the baby at the end that showed, itself, the possibility. … The alien [origin concept] is uniquely attached to Mother Nature. It simply comes off a wood beetle that will lay eggs inside some unsuspecting insect. And in so doing, the form of the egg will become the host for this new creature. That’s hideous. But that was what it was. And you can’t keep repeating that because the joke gets boring.

The sentiment might put a bee in the bonnet of horror fans who enjoy the different iterations of evil and creativity in sequels in a genre that trades heavily in them. It might even be hard to find a consensus among cinephiles that “Alien” was the best of the bunch. “Scream 2” contains a classroom discussion of how sequels generally disappoint; “Aliens” is held up as an example of a follow-up that surpasses its predecessor. Where most can agree is in Scott’s insistence that for a franchise to sustain itself, one can’t keep doing the same thing — the organism must grow and evolve.