There are at least two Alien franchise projects currently in development for Hulu on Disney+. There's an upcoming movie from director Fede Álvarez (Don't Breathe) titled Alien: Romulus, which is set between Alien and Aliens, and a live-action series from Noah Hawley (Fargo).
Hawley said his Alien prequel series will ignore Sir Ridley Scott's Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
“Ridley and I have talked about this — and many, many elements of the show,” Hawley says in an interview with KCRW. “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.”
Hawley’s Alien series shut down production in August due to the SAG-AFTRA strike but is expected to resume filming soon in Thailand. The ensemble cast includes Essie Davis, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Sydney Chandler, Adarsh Gourav, Timothy Olyphant and David Rysdahl.
As a lifelong fan of the Alien franchise (I watched the nightmarish original on rental video), I'm excited at the prospect of xenomorphs sans touchscreens.
Are you looking forward to the Alien movie and series on Disney+? Let me know in the comments below.
