Concept artists Dane Hallett and Matt Hatton were told not to use HR Giger art in Alien Covenant

BigDave Certainly Hallett and Hatton sounded a little bit bummed out they had to be drawing all those insects...

Hallett actually said he was very proud of those. He said Matt and him insisted that every one of those drawings give an insight into David's darkness, regardless of how banal it was.

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Below is an example of one of Hallett's pieces that Fox legal told him they could not use. Pretty obvious why if you have seen the Giger original, which Fox has no rights to as it was done prior to Alien, not for Alien.

"A shameless re-jigging of a Giger original (below). This was done when early on in the production we thought we'd be legaly allowed to reference the master directly. Legal stepped in and informed us otherwise." - Dane Hallett Facebook

I don't believe that fox own the works outright. I believe what usually happens is that fox will have negotiated with giger the sole production rights to his necromonicon iv catalogue but giger will have retained property rights of the catalogue. in actuality, giger would not be able to negotiate with other studios involving any works included within this catalogue. the original alien design is based off of his work and if fox want to use anything else directly or based off of these works within the catalogue, giger or his estate would have to be paid.  

Fox owns all rights to everything Giger created for the production of Alien. What we are talking about here are things Hatton and Hallett used that were not part of that, that Fox did NOT want to negotiate rights to, like the Giger copy that Hallett made shown above. That was based on a piece of Giger art than had nothing to do with Alien.

"Ridley had a very specific look he wanted and HGR's estate (rightfully) didn't want to suffer any plagiarism. But Plaguerism can be a bit of a blurry line in the art world, so we had to be super careful." - Dane Hallett Facebook

Below are a few other Giger copies that Hatton made for Covenant that he said Giger's estate would not approve.

kethol, think wer saying the same thing but in 2 different ways