Apollo 18's Scrapped Trilogy Plans Would Have Been Big

The idea of found footage as a filmmaking technique stretches back to at least 1961 with the release of Shirley Clarke's relatively obscure drama "The Connection." The found footage style was used to present scripted material as if it were documentary footage, employing a lot of shaky, handheld camera work and extemporaneous-sounding dialogue. The term "found footage" sprung from a common conceit of the style, which often implied that something horrible had happened to the filmmakers that prevented them from assembling and editing their footage. Once their footage was found, it was edited by a third party and presented in the theater.

There were many found footage films from 1961 until 2007, but the release and overwhelming success of Oren Peli's "Paranormal Activity" sparked a years-long wave of the format, with most of its glory-chasers employing horror as their baseline. Late 2000s found footage horror was largely effective, as it often posited that ghosts or monsters have always lurked in the background of our lives and that it was only the ubiquity of digital cameras that finally allowed us to see them.

The found footage conceit was extended cleverly to the sci-fi/horror genre in 2011 with the release of Gonzalo López-Gallego's "Apollo 18," a film constructed of "official" NASA footage taken during an ill-fated 1974 Apollo 18 moon mission. The fuzzy footage implied that there were killer spider-like aliens on the NASA craft, hence the public was never made aware of Apollo 18.

"Apollo 18" only cost $5 million to make and earned $26.5 million theatrically, making it a modest but unremarkable hit. It seems, however, that López-Gallego and screenwriter Brian Miller had plans in case their film was a runaway success. Indeed, as they explained in an interview with SyFy, the filmmakers had an entire trilogy planned.

Miller seems to have seen "Apollo 18" as a mere proof of concept and hoped to leave the found footage conceit behind for its follow-ups. The sequels, Miller noted, would have been called (perhaps obviously) "Apollo 19" and "Apollo 20." He also noted that he wanted to switch from horror to action, very much like another popular sci-fi film franchise from the 1970s and 1980s. In his own words:

"My idea there was that it would be a little bit bigger, a little more broader in scope. Kind of like 'Alien' versus 'Aliens.' James Cameron came in and obviously knocked it out the park with the big action version once Ridley [Scott] had done the small, contained version. That's what I thought would be great: a big action movie on the Moon. Nobody's really done that yet."

Clearly, Miller hadn't seen the films "Ad Astra," "First Men in the Moon," "Iron Sky," "Moonfall," "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," or "A Trip to the Moon," but one might take his meaning. Ridley Scott directed "Alien" in 1979, and it was a quiet horror movie about an alien creature running amok on a futuristic spacecraft populated only by blue-collar miners. In 1986, James Cameron made a sequel called "Aliens," which ratcheted up the action and followed the adventures of well-armed space marines as they faced off against dozens of alien creatures and their queen. 

It seems that Miller was a fan of Cameron's follow-up more than he was of Scott's "Alien" and hoped that his sequel to "Apollo 18" would be the "high octane" version of the original. Notably, "Apollo 19" also wasn't going to be a found footage movie. 

Following the high-octane, "Aliens"-like action of his "Apollo 19," Miller felt that the franchise could continue into a massive concluding chapter, "Apollo 20," which would have taken the action away from the Moon and back to Earth. Sadly, the sequels were never made, so Miller said he might have to hop over to another medium. To quote him directly:

"I've thought of writing it as a novel or short story, because I love doing that kind of stuff, too. [...] It's such a great world and I'd love to get back into it." 

López-Gallego, meanwhile, had no plans to follow Miller into his wild "Aliens"-like action film. Indeed, it seems he would have liked it if "Apollo 18" featured less action overall and might have preferred an opportunity to re-cut the film to his liking. The director felt that the final theatrical cut of his movie was too quickly paced and left out all of the moodier, more introspective character moments that he was fond of. As he explained:

"Some of the stuff that got cut out were those dramatic elements, more contemplative [and] maybe less commercial. [...] I'm not a huge fan of doing things for the audience. Normally, my opinion is I must like what I'm doing and then if they like it, I'm lucky. [...] There was something interesting about the characters. [...] I wanted to portray the isolation and the loneliness that they feel when they're there."

The film's final act, López-Gallego felt, had too much incident. If both the writer and director have their way, we'll eventually see a slower-moving director's cut of "Apollo 18," as well as a more monster-tastic sequel. Time will tell if we get either.