A resurfaced comment from Aliens producer Gale Anne Hurd has highlighted a deleted scene from James Cameron's 1986 sequel that would have shown Ellen Ripley promising her own daughter she'd return for her birthday, only to break that promise. Hurd said the scene was cut purely for length, but that it was originally intended to explain Ripley's fierce protectiveness towards Newt, the orphaned girl she takes under her wing after her Colonial Marines mission to confront the Xenomorphs.

Sigourney Weaver's Ripley returns from cryosleep in Aliens to discover she has been asleep long enough that her daughter has grown old and died without her, a backstory element that underpins the film's themes of motherhood following the more overtly sexualised horror of the original 1979 film. Hurd argued that despite the cut, the film still delivers an empowering portrait of maternal courage through Ripley's arc, describing her as a reluctant heroine. The fuller version of this backstory, including further material on the daughter, was later restored in Cameron's director's cut, which is widely regarded as a rare extended edition that genuinely completes the story rather than simply padding it out.