The long-running Alien science fiction/horror franchise is coming to TV. As part of the December 10 news tsunami for its Investor Day, Disney revealed that Noah Hawley (Fargo, Legion) has been tapped as creator for an Alien series on the FX network. Reportedly, Alien director and series creator Ridley Scott is in negotiations to come aboard as an executive producer.
The series is billed by Disney as “a scary thrill ride set not too far in the future here on Earth.” Reportedly, this would make it the first entry in the core Alien franchise to take place in both a modern setting and on Earth, discounting both of the live-action Alien vs. Predator movies.
The series’ tone, according to FX’s John Landgraf, is meant to split the difference between the original Alien‘s “timeless horror” and the high-intensity action of James Cameron’s Aliens. Landgraf has not mentioned how he or his network plan to do that on a TV budget, unless Disney plans to back up the money truck on this one.
This marks a sudden reversal of fortune for Hawley’s plans to make an Alien TV show, which were widely said to have been shot down by Fox executives in 2019. After the Disney/Fox merger in early 2019, however, a lot of projects seem to have suddenly shaken loose from whatever was holding them back. Alien was announced alongside a couple of other TV adaptations that had been stuck in development hell for a while, such as the long-awaited live-action series based on Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s hit Vertigo comic Y: The Last Man. (The rumor is that a lot of the big studios are refocusing on streaming and TV, in anticipation of a pandemic-induced contraction of the domestic theater circuit. Movies as a medium aren’t dead, but their old revenue model might be).
The Alien series began in 1979 with Scott’s original hit horror film, starring Sigourney Weaver and Yaphet Kotto as space truckers who accidentally pick up a homicidal, chest-bursting stowaway. James Cameron’s follow-up Aliens in 1986 established both the franchise’s hold on pop culture and a strong influence on action films thereafter, with H.R. Giger’s design for the Xenomorphs quickly becoming one of the iconic movie monsters of 20th-century film.
Like a lot of its contemporaries, however, Alien as a series has largely been running off of the cultural momentum from its first two movies (and depending on who’s talking, the third) for almost 30 years now. Scott returned to the franchise in the 2010s with two prequels, 2012’s Prometheus and 2017’s Alien: Covenant.
Noah Hawley’s Alien currently has no set release date or casting announcements.
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