I met this guy in Dublin Comic Con , really nice dude . <| sep |> Yeah . a large part of that is due to how that writing process went they spent a long time making an actual Aliens sequel but at some point Weaver looked like she wasn ' t going to return , so , they switched focus to a script that focused on HicksNewtBishop . They didn ' t feel it was working there is a finished draft you can read online , and hired . Vincent Ward , I believe , who wrote the wood monastery planet script that didn ' t retain any characters . And then when Weaver decided to come back , they sort of stuck her character into that script while changing the monasterymonks to a prison planet . So , they essentially ended up in a situation where the loose ends of Aliens were more of a nuisance than anything , and had to be tossed aside to get to the otherwise essentially unrelated story .