“Greed is good,” said the xenomorph. James Cameron reveals Aliens was originally a Wall Street satire

The little girl stands shivering, waist deep in water. She clutches a teddy bear and her ragged breathing is all that can be heard.

Slowly, a xenomorph rises to its full height behind her. The girl’s breath catches as she turns it face it. 

It stares down at the girl and speaks.

“Greed, for want of a better word, is good. Greed works,” it says.

“Aliens was always set to be a satire of the early 80s stock market boom,” explains James Cameron, in a new documentary.

“Ever since I saw Ridley’s original Alien, I just always thought of xenomorphs as those stock market dealers. Those masters of the universe types who dominated the stock market in the early eighties.

“Aliens was originally a satire of those people. Of that time. You had the humans, living on LV-426, just trying to get on with their lives. Then you have the aliens, they just see the humans as people to be exploited for their own personal enrichment.”

The original plot saw a young xenomorph who looks up to Gecko, a fabulously successful and wealthy xenomorph who makes his fortune from buying companies and selling off all their assets left until there’s nothing viable left, leaving the people out of work. The young xenomorph starts working for Gecko, but has a crisis of conscience when he sees what is happening to the settlers on LV-426.

Then Ripley and the marines come in and kill all the xenomorphs.

“Ultimately, we figured that all the business with the stock market was distracting from the action. It was a long script and it had become really rather unwieldy,” continued Cameron.

“We cut the stock market stuff, and the satire, and Oliver Stone used that to form the basis of his picture, so it was great that it didn’t go to waste.”

The director also went on to reveal that Titanic originally included a terrifying wizard called Voldemort and that The Abyss had a subplot with a gang of Scottish heroin addicts getting into various scrapes.