#Alien Series ‘Going Slowly,’ According to Showrunner

“#Alien Series ‘Going Slowly,’ According to Showrunner”

A series based on the Alien franchise has been in active development a while, and it seems that it may be a lot longer before we see it on screen.

Every long-running franchise seems to reach a point when it becomes more divisive than loved by fans. The many sequels to Ridley Scott’s Alien is a prime example, having spawned the masterpiece sequel Aliens and several others, including two prequels, with many of the later entries all receiving a very mixed reception from audiences and critics. So the question many fans have been asking is will the upcoming Alien TV series be able to bring the franchise back to its sci-fi horror roots? According to showrunner Noah Hawley, it is going to be a long wait to find out.

Having previously worked on the series Fargo, Hawley was attached to the Alien project in December 2020 alongside Ridley Scott, who would be working on the movie in some form. Over the last year, we have discovered some pieces of information about the series, including that it will not feature the same characters as the original Alien movies and is instead set on a future vision of Earth, where where “white-collar executives” are “facing the xenomorph’s wrath” this time rather than the space workers of the original who were attempting to prevent the creature escaping its own planet. How all of this will come about, we don’t yet know, but Hawley recently made a comment to Esquire about the progress of the 10 part show, saying:

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“It’s going great. It’s going slowly, unfortunately, given the scale of it.”

Obviously, the Alien franchise was one of the many IPs that found itself being taken under the Disney banner when they bought out 20th Century Fox. While some were initially skeptical about what this could mean for any future Alien-related output, it seems that under the control of Disney, the series could well be brought back on track after some questionable entries in the last couple of decades. Also, from Hawley’s comments, it is clear that the film is not scrimping on anything and looks like it will be worth the wait when it does arrive.

The original Alien trilogy, which effectively should have ended the story of Ellen Ripley and the xenomorphs before things started to be pushed out into a “what if we make it do this” scenario that resulted in Alien Resurrection and two Alien vs Predator movies, as well as Ridley Scott’s own Prometheus and Alien: Covenant prequels, only explored the Aliens in an outer space setting, so Hawley has some work to do when bringing them to Earth. It is to be expected that he will be creating a brand new set of characters and settings that will be just as important to selling the idea as the Aliens themselves.

In 2018, in a number of interviews, Scott said that he believed the Alien creature itself had run its course, which seemed to be a direct response to the lackluster response to his two prequel movies. However, things change over time, and perhaps this series will give the director one last shot at doing something with the creature he first brought to the screen over forty years ago.