Though Ridley Scott’s recent interview with The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern runs a full two pages, virtually all of the media attention has been on its final sentence:

“And we’ll definitely be featuring a female protagonist [in Blade Runner 2].”

But the entire interview – which focuses not on Blade Runner 2, but on Scott’s long history of films starring women – is well worth reading. What it’s like to pitch a female-led action film, in Scott’s own words:

“It’s far more considered normal to have a female in the lead [than it was in the past], and yet, studios will always look at the bottom line and the value of a female lead versus a male lead globally, because none of the budgets for these films are getting any smaller, so they have to take into account the bottom line from a business standpoint.”

Last January, I wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The Rise of the Female-Led Action Film” that traced the shift of the action genre – which was once Hollywood’s most sexist genre, and has gradually become one of its most progressive. Ridley Scott and Alien writer Dan O’Bannon deserve much of the credit for this change; though Alien was groundbreaking in many ways, its most enduring legacy is protagonist Ellen Ripley, whose first silver-screen outing in 1979 represents the tipping point of the action genre’s shift from sexism to feminism.

James Cameron (the other great feminist action director) gets the credit for Ripley’s shift to a full-fledged action icon in the 1986 sequel Aliens. But the seeds of what the character would eventually become were sown in the original Alien’s ending. At its core – and unlike its three direct sequels – Alien is a horror movie, right down to the “final girl” at the end. But Scott makes an important distinction that separates Ripley from the “final girl” of Alien’s horror contemporaries:

“In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre […] that girl was still standing at the end covered in blood, but she’d survived rather than won. The difference with Ripley was that she had won and survived.”

Given his history, it’s unsurprising that Scott decided to cast Noomi Rapace as the lead in Prometheus after being impressed by her performance as Lisbeth Salander – arguably the most iconic new female character of the decade – in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

And the Blade Runner universe offers just as many opportunities for both insight and critique. Though the original Blade Runner’s feminist themes are far less front-and-center than Alien’s, there’s a scathing feminist critique embedded in its story as well. Blade Runner features an enormously gender-stratified society. All of the characters in power are men, and each of the major female characters is a replicant, with Daryl Hannah’s Pris getting the worst of it as a “basic pleasure model.” When replicant Roy Batty breaks one of Deckard’s fingers for each of the female replicants he’s “retired” during the film, he’s breaking the government tool that has literally dehumanized – and eventually dispatched – each of the most important women in his life. We know nothing about Blade Runner 2’s female protagonist, who could easily turn out to be a blade runner or a replicant (or both). But I’m thrilled by the idea of revisiting Blade Runner’s gender-stratified dystopia through the eyes of a woman.

In preparation for Prometheus, which looks just ridiculously awesome, I’ve been watching the movies in the Alien franchise I hadn’t seen before. And in the course of that, and related futzing around the web, I realized how striking the per-movie numbers were as an illustration of how the economics of blockbusters have changed:

Alien (1979)
Budget: $11 million ($34.8 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $104,931,801 ($331.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: Approximately $33,333 ($105,321 in 2012 dollars)

Aliens (1986)
Budget: $18.5 million ($38.72 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $131,060,248 ($274.3 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $1 million ($2.1 million in 2012 dollars)

Alien 3 (1992)
Budget: $50 million ($81.8 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $159,773,545 ($261.2 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $4 million plus a share of box office ($6.5 million in 2012 dollars)

Alien Resurrection (1997)
Budget: $70 million ($100 million in 2012 dollars)
Domestic and International Box Office: $161,295,658 ($230.5 million in 2012 dollars)
Sigourney Weaver’s Salary: $11 million ($15.7 million in 2012 dollars)

Prometheus
Budget: Estimated at $100-$150 million

I don’t think there’s a direct relationship between expensiveness and badness—The Avengers cost $220 million, which doesn’t count the expensive advertising campaign around it, and is just jaw-droppingly great (it is killing me not to be able to talk to you guys about it yet. Friday cannot be here soon enough). But at the same time, you can afford to do weirder things if there’s less money sunk into them. The Avengers kind of earns back some of that freedom—and I think Prometheus does, too—to be funny and weird and interesting and frightening because it’s guaranteed to make all of the money even if it was wretched. But a lot of the time when someone like, say, Michael Bay is in that position, they take precisely zero advantage of it. It’s one thing to be creative because you have to be to have a prayer of getting noticed and loved. It’s another to be creative because you have the luxury to be. On bad days, it seems like everyone else is just checking boxes. But this year feels to me like a time when the movies are new and exciting. I could be proven wrong. But it’s been fun so far.

One thing I’ve always liked about the Alien franchise is that it’s part of that subgenre of science fiction that’s concerned with the rise of corporate power. The Mars novels may be my favorite example of this, but work in the space tends to assume that the future might not be so shiny and happy after all, and plots get kicked off not when utopia is shattered, but when something threatens to upend what fragile balance we’ve achieved. So I’m pretty curious to see if the research team in Prometheus, for which we finally, oh joy, have a trailer, turn out to be independent or corporate-funded. Skewing results for the sake of pleasing your backers could make for some really nice tension.

I was watching Alien over the weekend with some friends, and one thing that struck me was the extent to which Sigourney Weaver’s allowed to cry, and freak out, and shake, and her having an emotional reaction to the fact that a giant alien is eating everyone she knows, and threatening her cat, and one of those friends turns out to be a semi-evil android is treated as if it’s in no way incongruous with her ability to absolutely kick ass.

We’re in this moment where there are a lot of action heroines, among them little girls, who execute extremely badass things, but with extreme calm and detachment. Hit Girl may take some deep breaths before she absolutely decimates a hallway full of mobsters, and she may cry when her father dies, but she appears to have very little emotional reaction to the things that are going on around her:

Similarly, the heroine of Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming Haywire reacts to Michael Fassbender’s (and other people’s) attempts to kill her — which I know at minimum would make me pretty sad, not to mention totally panicked — with fairly impressive aplomb:

I don’t know if Angelina Jolie’s the reason for this trend in female action stars who wreak enormous amounts of havoc while maintaining perfect composure, but she is certainly among the most effective practitioners of the form — in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, she only gets tearful when the fight is over:

I’ve been sort of skeptical of Colombiana, on the grounds that it’s yet another portrait of a traumatized killing machine, but I’m prepared to be a bit more enthusiastic if the movie uses the main character’s freakouts less as a juxtaposition with her efficiency than as an illustration of the cost of the violence that consumed her family, the tally she’s adding to now:

Of course, given that I don’t have a lot of experience in any of these circumstances, maybe the dichotomy in emotional reactions makes sense, and revenge killings are much less anxiety-inducing than being stalked by a psychosexual nightmare direbeast.

I wouldn’t want to go so far as to say that I think female killers in pop culture should bear a burden their male counterparts don’t, of anchoring us to the reality of what it would be like if the explosions and the blood were real. But Ripley and Alien are a reminder that sometimes, action sequences are more effective when they’re earned, when victory requires a lot of sweat and struggle, and sometimes, the only reward is your own continued life.