The newly launched and extremely anticipated Alien: Earth dropped its first two episodes on Tuesday, August 12 2025, garnering spectacular viewership numbers. The critics are loving it with a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (as of the time of this text), whereas the followers are extra lukewarm at 72%. Nonetheless, even with these numbers, this can be a fairly spectacular debut for a franchise that has solely been seen on cinema screens to date. In reality, these sorts of numbers are sufficient to get studio executives excited and fascinated with future franchise expansions.
Nevertheless, that may of worms deserves its personal dialogue, and earlier than we begin fascinated with the longer term, it might be a good suggestion to take a look at the franchise’s previous and see the way it has advanced and altered because the ’80s. At 46 and counting, Alien is one in all fashionable media’s most enduring franchises, principally on account of its capability to reinvent its personal kind with out shedding the primal dread and physique horror that made it unforgettable in 1979, when the primary film, directed by the legendary Ridley Scott, dropped.
1979’s Alien, starring Sigourney Weaver in her breakout position as Ellen Ripley (now considered a big feminine protagonist in cinema historical past, was a single-location nightmare. It incorporates a working-class crew on an interstellar business house tug, referred to as the Nostromo, trapped with an ideal organism that has unparalleled organic and behavioral variations for survival and predation. However what made the film scary wasn’t the alien itself (although it performed a significant position), however a mix of various design and storytelling components.
The Xenomorph (the alien species’ identify) is a imply and un-green killing machine, and an ideal organism for a cause. It’s able to surviving in excessive environments, it’s extremely aggressive and devoid of any morality, and it has excellent defenses (a tough exoskeleton and acid for blood). Its design hits the human psyche on a primal degree, because it’s made to look biomechanical and psychosexual with out clear animal cues. It has no seen eyes, it has enamel inside enamel, and a copy methodology that utterly violates its prey’s bodily autonomy.
Maybe most difficult of all, the Xenomorph is sort of not possible to defeat with standard strategies, rendering typical action-movie options ineffective. With out going too deep into the plot, we’ll simply point out that Ellen Ripley survives to face the creature once more within the sequel, the place its deadly fangs stay simply as sharp and salivatory. The third and fourth Alien films shifted in the direction of genetic tinkering, with main firms attempting to weaponize the Xenomorph species for their very own acquire, going so far as to introduce the human-Xenomorph hybrid within the fourth movie.
Now, it’s actually vital to say the comics and different Alien media. Most cinema franchises, excluding these primarily based on comedian books (just like the MCU and DC Universe), use comedian books and video video games as “facet dishes” that develop the unique universe. However, in relation to Alien, comedian books and video video games provide indispensable scaffolding that vastly expanded the Xenomorph’s xenobiology, cults, in-universe firms, and off-world hives. Principally, these expanded upon all the fabric the flicks by no means had time or curiosity in exploring.
Crucial amongst these are Alien vs. Predator comics and video video games, which turned the aliens’ hive biology right into a political commodity and codified how Xenomorphs behave inside their hierarchies. The Subsequently launched Alien: Isolation online game was a masterclass in survival horror gaming, and whereas its canon standing is debatable, its affect on the franchise is plain, from the best way Xenomorphs behave, to minute particulars current on the company gear unfold all through the surroundings—that is principally seen in Alien: Romulus, however extra on that later.
The comics and the video games additionally resulted in a cinematic adaptation, the Alien vs. Predator movies, which pit the just about unkillable and untamable organism towards the universe’s ritualized, techno-tribal apex hunters whose complete tradition is predicated round proving their value towards harmful prey. The primary film was a surprisingly good time when you had been within the temper for a monster smackdown, however a actually uninteresting horror expertise that includes two of the cinema’s most iconic alien monsters. The second film, AvP: Requiem, was even worse than the primary, and we received’t spend time or phrases on that individual flop.
Fortuitously, Ridley Scott returned to the cinematic franchise in 2010 and steered it in the direction of a creation delusion with Prometheus and its sequel, Alien: Covenant, thus relocating worry from air ducts on a company tug to cosmology and creation. These movies didn’t change the Xenomorph, nor what it was (they did introduce some subspecies, although), however they reimagined it as a byproduct of hubristic creation, turning it into an engineered horror, somewhat than an advanced predator. We received’t dive into how this was achieved, however the Xenomorph all of us love and worry is a product of bioengineering, at the very least in keeping with the lore set by Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
In 2024 got here Alien: Romulus, an absolute delight that not solely made stylistic strides again in the direction of tactile horror but in addition reintroduced the franchise’s company malfeasance and made lore corrections that made Prometheus and Covenant canon, even supposing their canon standing stays questionable among the many followers, themselves. The film was peppered with connective tissue between all six films (excluding AvP movies) and was full of Easter eggs from Alien: Isolation. It’s an incredible film, and each critics and followers completely liked it.
The lately launched Alien: Earth is the franchise’s first full TV collection that goals to develop the claustrophobic horror right into a slow-burning planetary thriller. Its story is about two years earlier than the Nostromo’s fateful flight and threads instantly into the unique timeline utilizing longform storytelling to discover concepts that films couldn’t. The collection additionally deliberately sidesteps the cosmology and creation of the Xenomorph and makes use of its personal proximity to the unique to make its dread really feel much less mythic and extra speedy.
The idea of company malfeasance throughout the Alien universe, the franchise’s true Large Unhealthy, has metastasized, and as a substitute of simply Weyland-Yutani, Earth now situates humanity beneath a cartel of 5 megacorps. The Xenomorph was at all times the engine of horror throughout the franchise, however the firms had been the true antagonists. The results of company actions, starting from boss-incentivized corner-cutting selections to Ash’s secret directives, Burke’s “unintended” facehugger launch, and David’s god complicated, had been at all times the principle causes behind the horrific catastrophes.
Ultimately, it’s fairly evident that many issues have modified within the Alien franchise over the course of 46+ years, and whereas the general cinematic universe retains increasing, the extra fashionable entries within the franchise have relearned restraint and have determined to maintain the dimensions smaller. The cameras now not comply with clanking chains, shadows throughout hallway doorways, and viscous fluids that appear to be they scent terrible. They now roam throughout company boardrooms, lab theaters, and crash websites on our dwelling planet.
So, if we needed to pinpoint stuff, we’d say that just about every part across the edges has modified. The setting has modified, the universe and its lore expanded dramatically, and even the stuff behind the scenes modified. What hasn’t modified is the engine driving the franchise’s horror: the proper organism, now on Earth, by no means stopping, at all times studying, and adapting. And neither, apparently, did the franchise.
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