Miller appears to have seen “Apollo 18” as a mere proof of idea and hoped to depart the discovered footage conceit behind for its follow-ups. The sequels, Miller famous, would have been known as (maybe clearly) “Apollo 19” and “Apollo 20.” He additionally famous that he needed to modify from horror to motion, very very similar to one other standard sci-fi movie franchise from the Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. In his personal phrases:
“My thought there was that it could be just a little bit greater, just a little extra broader in scope. Type of like ‘Alien’ versus ‘Aliens.’ James Cameron got here in and clearly knocked it out the park with the large motion model as soon as Ridley [Scott] had achieved the small, contained model. That is what I believed could be nice: an enormous motion film on the Moon. No person’s actually achieved that but.”
Clearly, Miller hadn’t seen the movies “Advert Astra,” “First Males within the Moon,” “Iron Sky,” “Moonfall,” “Transformers: Darkish of the Moon,” or “A Journey to the Moon,” however one would possibly take his which means. Ridley Scott directed “Alien” in 1979, and it was a quiet horror film about an alien creature operating amok on a futuristic spacecraft populated solely by blue-collar miners. In 1986, James Cameron made a sequel known as “Aliens,” which ratcheted up the motion and adopted the adventures of well-armed house marines as they confronted off towards dozens of alien creatures and their queen.
Plainly Miller was a fan of Cameron’s follow-up greater than he was of Scott’s “Alien” and hoped that his sequel to “Apollo 18” could be the “excessive octane” model of the unique. Notably, “Apollo 19” additionally wasn’t going to be a discovered footage film.