20th Century Fox/Kobal/ShutterstockJames 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.Before that, Cameron was negotiating from the considerably less impressive position of being the director of Piranha II. But things did work out in the end, and Aliens cemented his reputation as a blockbuster mastermind.Released seven years after the original Alien movie — and celebrating its 40th anniversary this week — Aliens represents a kind of creative pivot that we rarely see in studio franchises today. Helmed by Ridley Scott, Alien was shaped by a team with strong ties to Star Wars and Alejandro Jodorowsky's ambitious but famously unfinished Dune adaptation, with artist H.R. Giger designing the now-iconic xenomorphs, and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (who worked as a VFX artist on Star Wars) recruiting Star Wars concept artist Ron Cobb to design the film’s spaceships. Their work went on to influence decades of sci-fi cinema.The resulting film is tense and atmospheric, structured like a slasher movie (a genre that was rapidly taking off in the late 1970s), with elements of body horror, dystopian futurism, and classic space exploration thrills. Above all, however, Alien is a horror movie, as evidenced by the many reports of audience members fainting in disgust during the chestburster scene. So it was a bold move to look at this property and reframe its sequel as an action/adventure story. Which is exactly what James Cameron did.Starring Sigourney Weaver alongside (for obvious reasons) a new ensemble cast, Aliens opens with Ripley waking up from cryosleep, decades after the original movie. Pressured by the malevolent Weyland-Yutani corporation, she joins a crew of space marines to investigate a possible source of xenomorphs.Unlike the first film, which was full of enigmatic imagery that purposefully built suspense around the xenomorph’s appearance, Aliens launched in with guns very literally blazing, embracing a chest-thumping style of military action that now feels extremely 1980s.The iconic power loader scene. | 20th Century Fox/Kobal/ShutterstockAfter his debut with Piranha II, Cameron had an incredible seven-year run at the box office: The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and then Terminator II: Judgment Day. These films established his ability to appeal to a mass audience, combining blockbuster action and visual effects with an anti-authoritarian streak. One of the many notable elements of this legacy is that between Ripley and Terminator II’s Sarah Connor, Cameron is responsible for developing two of the most influential and beloved female action heroes in Hollywood history — both of whom would likely inspire a reactionary backlash if they made their debut today.The tonal shift between Alien and Aliens is key to its success, subtly discouraging viewers from perceiving the sequel as a knockoff of the original. Fans can debate ad infinitum which film is the best, and there’s no obvious right answer because the two movies essentially belong to different genres. Ridley Scott’s creative team came up with the aesthetic and background worldbuilding that made Alien so uniquely captivating, yet Cameron took that material and made it his own, with a distinctive style of sci-fi action that now lives on in the Avatar movies.Over the coming decades, the Alien franchise would continue this trajectory of hiring filmmakers who put their own individual spin on the property. And while their output wasn’t always critic-proof, that sense of variety made the Alien universe all the more interesting in the long run.It’s certainly a different approach than we see for most major franchises in the present day, whose studio overseers seem more invested in maintaining their brand than allowing directors to flourish. By giving James Cameron free rein to make his mark instead of delivering a carbon-copy of the previous film, 20th Century Fox facilitated one of the greatest sequels of all time — and set a precedent for the franchise’s recent comeback with Alien: Romulus and Alien: Earth.Aliens is available to rent on Prime Video and other digital platforms.