Iconic Alien movie poster finally arrives on a premium silver foil courtesy of the Perth Mint

The New Zealand Mint has popularised the concept of a large silver foil and did so by the simple act of reproducing movie posters and comic covers. As the movie memorabilia market is both capacious and full of variety, it’s hard to argue with that as a business plan. Despite that,and the low cost of developing and producing them, large silver foils are rare outside of that mint. The Perth Mint has now decided to dabble.

After a delay (this was due out in March), the Perth Mint is launching its first premium foil and it’s no surprise that a movie poster is the subject of choice. This year is the 40th since the premiere of one of my all-time favourite movies, and an absolute classic of the genre – Alien. Directed by visual genius Ridley Scott, and with a look based around the bio-mechanical work of Swiss artist H.R. Giger, Alien rewrote the rule book on the sc-fi monster movie, probably to a degree that no other genre has been reinvented. Bleak, violent, gory and with brilliant cinematography, Alien was a huge change from the rubber-suited monster movies of the sixties.

Not the first Alien release this year, the Perth Mint has already issued a rectangular silver coin and a very cool 2oz antiqued facehugger design in a Xenomorph egg, the iconic poster for Alien is a good choice for this first ‘super-foil’. This isn’t a coin, so the obverse side is just a repeating pattern of the mints name.

There are a couple of factors that raise this above the NZ Mints issues. Firstly, the frame the foil is presented in has a very neat stand system comprising of a couple of metal pins that simply pop into the bottom of it – very neat and modern looking. Secondly, and more importantly, the mintage is but a fraction of the numerous Star Trek and Star Wars releases from their Antipodean competitors. Only 1,000 of these will be made available, well below the 10,000 of the others. A neat release. Not for everyone, but movie fans will find a lot to like her.