The Alien franchise is finally getting fresh blood. It was announced today during the Disney Investor Day event that Fargo’s Noah Hawley will officially get to make his long-gestating Alien series at FX on Hulu and producer Ridley Scott is along for the ride. The new project will be set on Earth, but as Noah has suggested recently in interviews, he wants to explore the human side of the Alien franchise rather than just the xenomorphs, so don’t let the Earth scare you too much. He had cited Aliens corporate slug Carter Burke being just as vicious, who basically got the majority of the colonists killed trying to secure the xenomorph for Weyland-Yutani’s bio-weapons division.
READ MORE: Noah Hawley Breaks Down His ‘Alien’ TV Series Idea & Compares It To ‘Legion’
Noah had previously talked about a rejected pitch to FX about an Alien series and dodged further questions when Deadline pressed him that there was word the series was moving forward.
Back in 2019, it was rumored at HN Entertainment that Alien: Covenant director Ridley Scott was considering an Alien series at Hulu, and it looks like this was indeed that project. Scott has also been attempting to make a third prequel film referred to as “Alien: Awakening,” although, the director has alluded to possibly moving on from the xenomorph in this potential new feature film project.
At one point, there had been early plans for “Alien Awakening” to directly tie-into Scott’s original “Alien” from 1979. Still, for whatever reason, after the subsequent disappointment of “Alien: Covenant,” the director has shied away from those grand plans.
Pivoting from ideas in the development phase is extremely familiar to the franchise. Nearly every film has a thrown out its original concept for the final film that ends up being shot. In the case of David Fincher’s “Alien 3,” things in the script were changing the day scenes were being executed.
Neill Blomkamp’s unmade “Alien 5,” which had franchise star Sigourney Weaver attached to reprise her iconic role of Ellen Ripley, should be a good reminder that not every germ of an idea becomes a reality. Ridley Scott even attempted to make his own version of a fifth movie about two decades ago with James Cameron. The studio still ended up picking Paul W.S. Anderson’s “Alien vs. Predator” instead.
Where exactly the original series from FX on Hulu lands in the franchise’s timeline remains to be seen and what this means for future films as there are at last two projects on the table at 20th Century Studios.