Director Fede Alvarez recently brought us a new installment in the Alien franchise with his movie Alien: Romulus, but we already have another new Alien project to look forward to. Fargo TV series creator Noah Hawley has been developing an Alien TV series for “FX on Hulu” for the last couple years, and below you’ll find Everything We Know About the Alien TV Series!
One of the first things we heard about the Alien series – and one of the most surprising things about it – is that it will actually be set on Earth, a couple decades before the events of the first movie. FX chairman John Landgraf has said the show will take place “right near the end of this century”, and a late-2090s setting would place this between the prequel films Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Hawley decided to set the show on Earth because “The alien stories are always trapped… Trapped in a prison, trapped in a space ship. I thought it would be interesting to open it up a little bit so that the stakes of ‘What happens if you can’t contain it?’ are more immediate.” The setting is reflected in the title of the show, as Landgraf revealed it’s called Alien: Earth.
Alien: Earth has the following synopsis: When a mysterious space vessel crash-lands on Earth, a young woman (Sydney Chandler) and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet’s greatest threat.
Even though the date would put the show between Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, Hawley has told The Hollywood Reporter that fans shouldn’t expect to see any connection to those films in his series. He wasn’t a fan of the back story those Ridley Scott-directed prequels gave to the Xenomorph, and also felt that the technology on display was too advanced. As he put it, “Ridley and I have talked about this — and many, many elements of the show. For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’ — as it was described in the first film — is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space. The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that’s just inherently less useful to me. And in terms of the mythology, what’s scary about this monster, is that when you look at those first two movies, you have this retro-futuristic technology. You have giant computer monitors, these weird keyboards … You have to make a choice. Am I doing that? Because in the prequels, Ridley made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien, which is supposed to take place in those movies’ future. There’s something about that that doesn’t really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films. And so that’s the choice I’ve made — there’s no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me.”
Alien franchise heroine Ellen Ripley, who was played by Sigourney Weaver in the first four movies, will not be a part of the show – and not just because Ripley would be a small child in the 2090s. Hawley never considered putting Ripley in the show because he feels her story has been wrapped up. “She’s one of the great characters of all time, and I think the story has been told pretty perfectly, and I don’t want to mess with it.”
The Weyland-Yutani corporation has been a villain lurking in the background throughout the franchise (occasionally emerging more into the foreground in some installments), and Landgraf has confirmed that there will be references to Weyland-Yutani in the Alien TV series. For the most part, though, the show will “take place in the territory of a different corporation” that Hawley has come up with. Speaking with Esquire, Hawley said that there will be competing companies in his series. “In the movies, we have this Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which is clearly also developing artificial intelligence—but what if there are other companies trying to look at immortality in a different way, with cyborg enhancements or transhuman downloads? Which of those technologies is going to win? It’s ultimately a classic science fiction question: does humanity deserve to survive? As Sigourney Weaver said in that second movie, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t f*ck each other over for a percentage.’ Even if the show was 60% of the best horror action on the planet, there’s still 40% where we have to ask, ‘What are we talking about beneath it all?’ Thematically, it has to be interesting.”
Neither Landgraf or Hawley have ever confirmed how many episodes the first season of Alien will have, but back in August of 2022 Landgraf did tell Deadline that Hawley had already delivered all of the scripts for the show. With many shows, scripts are still being written while episodes are being filmed, but that wasn’t the case with this one. So the writers strike didn’t hold up the progress on Alien: Earth at all. The actors strike, on the other hand, did cause a bit of trouble…
With the scripts in place, Hawley was said to be meeting was the show’s production designer back in January of 2023, getting ready to dive into production on Alien as soon as he finished work on the fifth season of Fargo. At the start of May, it was announced that Hawley had found the show’s lead: Sydney Chandler, whose previous credits include Don’t Worry Darling and the mini-series Pistol. She will be playing the meta-human Wendy, who has the body of an adult, but the brain and consciousness of a child.
Hawley is working to make sure viewers will be interested in what’s going on with her even when the xenomorphs aren’t rampaging across the screen. Speaking with Observer, Hawley said, “If you’re going to make something for television, you’ve got 10 hours let’s say. Even if you have a lot of action, like two hours, then you’re still going to have eight hours left. So what is the show about? As I did with Legion, the exercise is: Let’s take the superhero stuff out of the show and see if it’s still a great show. What’s the show about? Let’s take the alien out of the show. What’s the show about? What are the themes, who are the characters and what is the human drama? Then we drop the aliens back in and we go, ‘This is great. Not only is there great human drama, but there’s aliens!’”
Chandler has been joined in the cast by Essie Davis (The Babadook) as Dame Silvia, Alex Lawther (The End of the F*cking World) as a soldier named CJ, Samuel Blenkin (Black Mirror) as a CEO named Boy Kavalier, Adarsh Gourav (The White Tiger) as a character named Slightly, Kit Young (Shadow and Bone) as a character called Tootles, and Timothy Olyphant (Justified) Kirsh, a synth who acts as a mentor and trainer for Wendy. Babou Ceesay (Guerrilla), Jonathan Ajayi (Wonder Woman 1984), Erana James (The Wilds), Lily Newmark (Sex Education), Diêm Camille (Washington Black), Adrian Edmondson (The Young Ones), Moe Bar-El (The Peripheral), and David Rysdahl (Fargo season 5) are in the cast as well, but no details have been revealed about their characters. Sandra Yi Sencindiver of Foundation will be playing “a senior member of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation” in multiple episodes, and her role could be expanded as the series continues.
Sencindiver told Variety, “I think that especially the fans who love films No. 1 [Ridley Scott’s Alien] and 2 [James Cameron’s Aliens] will be very pleased with the universe and the world-building in this reimagining. A lot of brilliant people, a lot of very interesting character actors [who are] very dedicated and, of course, Noah Hawley is just a brilliant storyteller.“ Variety added that Sencindiver is playing a crucial character named Yatani… and I wonder if that’s a typo and the character’s name is Yutani.
Speaking of the aliens, the rumor is that the special effects on this show will be handled by Weta Workshop, who have worked on the Lord of the Rings franchise, the Avatar movies, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Taika Waititi’s Thor movies, several Zack Snyder productions, and much more.
Variety revealed that Alien would be filming in Thailand. They heard this is “a large-scale undertaking that’s reportedly booked out multiple Bangkok studios and hired vast quantities of lighting equipment”. Unfortunately, they went into production right as the U.S. actors union SAG went on strike. The cast is a mix of SAG-AFTRA and Equity members, and two of the main leads (including Sydney Chandler) are SAG members. This means they couldn’t report to set during the strike, so the production had to work around their absence.
Speaking to The Wrap, Hawley confirmed that they filmed as much as they could without their SAG cast members, and were “able to complete filming most of the first hour. That said, I wasn’t able to film anything with my star. So I still have the bulk of the show to film, and we have seven more hours to shoot. I certainly would have loved to get the show in front of people as quickly as possible.” Once the SAG strike has come to an end, filming resumed and the show is aiming for a 2025 premiere. Sydney Chandler confirmed that her work on the first season of the show was finished as of July 2024.
Landgraf has said that Hawley’s approach to the Alien TV series is to be faithful to the ideas and styles of both Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens. He’ll be bringing his own ideas to the table, extending and reinventing the franchise – but at the same time, the aim is to make this show a blend of “the timeless horror of the first Alien film with the non-stop action of the second.”
During a recent panel at the Austin Film Festival (as reported by Slash Film), Hawley hinted that he’s going to be shaking up some of the familiar elements of the Alien franchise, including finding a way to play with the xenomorph life cycle. He said the structure of the Alien films “always mimics the life cycle of the creature, right? Which is egg, slow, Facehugger, starts to get faster – you know what I mean? And of course, that’s great for a horror movie to build that way. So I found a way to kind of innovate around that structure and play with it.“
Whatever is going on with their life cycle, the xenomorphs are said to have some scary moments on the show. Speaking with Deadline, Hawley said, “There’s something about seeing a Xenomorph in the wilds of Earth with your own eyes. That is truly chilling to think of it moving here among us, and so I can’t tell you under what circumstances you’ll see that, but you’ll see it — and you’re going to lock your door that night. What was really fun for me was to really engage with the creature, bring some of my own thoughts to the design while not touching the silhouette, because that’s sacrosanct. But some of the elements as we know, whatever the host is, informs what the final creature is. I just wanted to play around a little bit to make it as scary as it should be.“
Hawley has confirmed that FX is looking for this show to be a recurring series, not a limited series, so he has multiple seasons in mind and knows where the story is going. He told Collider, “I had an idea that I was excited about, that I could see the escalation of it from one year to another. That’s where we ended up not pitching them having a bible or pitching them blow-by-blow, but saying, ‘Big picture: this is the first movement, this is the second movement, and we’re ultimately going here.’ Obviously, they trust me after all these years, and the writing was on the page for the first year. So, in success, you tell the story and tell the story until the story is done. They’re very good at that at FX, of not wanting you to milk something that feels like it’s over.”
Speaking on on the Deadline podcast Crew Call, he revealed that Hulu is hoping to release the first two seasons of the show close together.
Ridley Scott serves as an executive producer on the Alien series through his Scott Free banner – but that doesn’t mean he has any expectation that the show will be able to surpass the quality of his original film. When The Independent asked him about the show, Scott simply said, “It’ll never be as good as the first one. That’s what I’ll say.” Industry scooper Daniel Richtman also shared a rumor on his Patreon that there is “a second Alien show in development, this time with Ridley Scott more directly involved.” We’ll share more information on this second Alien TV series as it is revealed
Are you looking forward to the Alien TV series? Let us know by leaving a comment below.