Mike Fleming

The 20th Century Fox promo that teased the upcoming first trailer for the Ridley Scott-directed Prometheus certainly seemed different from Scott’s iconic science fiction film Alien — but does one small clue at the end indicate there’s a closer tie to the franchise than previously believed? Fox and Scott originally set up the film to be a prequel to Alien, but that changed when Damon Lindelof came in for a rewrite job and ended up changing the focus enough that the combination of Jon Spaihts and Lindelof’s script is considered an original. But a look at the producing credits at the end of the promo raises eyebrows. Scott is credited as producer along with David Giler and Walter Hill. The latter two had nothing to do with this film, but Giler and Hill were producers on the original 1979 film, and they have gotten credit of some kind on every single Alien film, including two Alien vs. Predator spinoffs. An insider spoiled my hunch I’d found something here. They told me that the producing credit came from a long-ago settlement with Giler and Hill, and was warranted because of the origin of Prometheus before it broke away from the iconic Alien. The fact that the script credit only goes to Spaihts and Lindelof, with no mention that it’s based on characters created by original scribes Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, proves that it’s an original, I was told.