There have been rumblings of a big-screen remake of Alien Nation for a number of years, and the project has been in the hands of Jeff Nichols (Loving) for just as long. The original film introduced the Newcomers, an alien race who landed on Earth and were forced to live among the distrustful human population. The film starred James Caan as an LA police detective who finds himself partnered with a Newcomer played by Mandy Patinkin in order to solve a homicide.
Jeff Nichols had teased that his take on Alien Nation would be "epic" as well as the "biggest canvas [he's] ever painted on," but when Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, the project was put on pause. Since then, we haven't heard all that much about Alien Nation, but frequent Nichols collaborator Michael Shannon teased last year that the project could "mutate into something else." Well, that "something else" appears to be a TV series. While speaking on Roger Deakins' Team Deakins podcast (h/t /Film), Jeff Nichols said that "[Alien Nation is a possible series that might happen in the near future." Nichols continued, saying that he's been living with the project for too long to put it down.
I then had this idea of how I could take that title but a situation that has nothing to do with the original movie, necessarily, and I got really excited about it…I spent three years building out an entire alien civilization and this situation and this setup and all these characters, and it’s really what I’ve been doing for a long time. We were set to go make it. It was going to be our next big challenge for Adam and I, which would be making a big, $100 million studio film, still in Arkansas. Disney bought Fox and killed it, which was a little soul-crushing, to say the least.
Thankfully, Disney didn't kill Alien Nation off entirely as Jeff Nichols said that the studio later approached him about turning the project into a TV series. "So I have taken it and broken it into ten episodes, and it’s under consideration right now," Nichols said. "Who knows, people in far more powerful positions than me are deciding that. One of the tricks is, I want to shoot it like a giant film, and I’m not sure if we’ll be able to get away with that." It's hard to say whether the project will move forward in its new form, but I'll be keeping my fingers crossed, especially if Michael Shannon is involved.