>>281718405
Alien & Aliens was very family friendly all things considered. That's probably why it caught on so fast.
The protagonist survives, the cat survives despite Ripley dropping it in front of the alien, the little girl survives, etc. it was actually subverting expectations.
Normally horror movies go HARD and give no shits if your girlfriend, wife, soon to be wed, your child, your favourite character, etc. gets killed. Alien 3 did true horror and that's what turned people off from the series. Same with AVP Requiem where everyone gets nuked.
Same with the AVP2 video game where the cat does die, The Thing's wolves do get absorbed, so on and so forth.
People ironically want safe horror.