The original treatment of Aliens featured many scenes absent from the finished film, including an even worse fate for eventual Alien 3 casualty Hicks. Released in 1979, director Ridley Scott’s first slice of cinematic sci-fi was Alien, which proved a huge, surprise hit with both audiences and critics upon release. Alien introduced viewers to both the eponymous Xenomorph - an acid-blooded alien that remains one of sci-fi’s most popular monsters - and Sigourney Weaver’s heroine Ripley, making a sequel an inevitability.
However, despite the first movie’s outsized success, Aliens would not arrive on cinema screens until 1986, as The Terminator director James Cameron’s plans for the sequel proved ambitious enough to require rewrites and revisions. Cameron's first treatment for Aliens, simply titled Alien II, featured a second half that deviated a lot from the finished movie that viewers eventually saw.
The ending saw a desperate Ripley, Hicks, and Newt allowing themselves to be captured by the Xenomorphs and cocooned so that they can find a way to escape. The former duo emerges unscathed in this draft, but unfortunately, Hicks is impregnated by the Xenomorphs before he can join them and is left behind. Hicks' fate was likely changed for being too brutally bleak, and the details of his body-horror demise are nearly as twisted as the original fate of Prometheus' Shaw in Alien: Covenant.
Cameron's original treatment ending deviates from Aliens in interesting ways, starting from the moment the trio of Ripley, Newt and Hicks arrive at the landing zone late in the sequel’s action. The android Bishop radios and informs the group he is unable to land in case the titular aliens pursuing them make it off the moon due to the risky maneuver. Ripley unleashes her fury on the android who ignores her and flies off, leaving them to die after he notes Ripley was right to distrust him all along. Now stranded with no means of escape, the trio makes a run for the Atmosphere Processor, hoping to unearth the colony shuttle. Then - in an admittedly imperfect plan - Ripely and Hicks inject themselves with atropine, letting the Xenomorphs catch them and bring them to the same location Hudson was dragged off to earlier so they can hopefully find the shuttle.
When Ripley awakens and saves herself and Newt, she finds Hicks impregnated with a chest-burster and he orders her to escape and leave him to die. The pair follow his advice, with the exhaust heat of the shuttle destroying the egg chamber (and presumably what’s left of Hicks) as they blast off. The atmosphere processor soon follows suit in the explosive original finale that, while dramatic, was probably a little too bleak. However, while the character may have been spared by the action of Aliens, Alien 3 soon killed off Hicks and Newt with little fanfare in a move that Cameron claimed to hate (although he would later steal the trope for his Terminator sequel Dark Fate).