- calendar_today August 31, 2025
Alien: Earth Set Two Years Before Ridley Scott’s 1979 Classic
FX and Hulu are once again teasing their upcoming prequel series Alien: Earth ahead of its August 12 premiere, this time with a final trailer and a fuller, more developed synopsis. The summary confirms, while the trailer underscores, that the new series will feel chilling and cerebral: alternating slow-motion, almost existential vignettes of silence and serenity with abrupt sci-fi horror imagery, the film’s new trailer flashes the alien’s own, oft-seen spaceships in zero gravity, the dead sprawled in dark hallways, bloodied humans running for their lives, and, in the distance, what appears to be a dark, stocky outline of something all-too-familiar to the Alien franchise: a xenomorph, waiting in the shadows.
Series showrunner and filmmaker Noah Hawley has promised that both the tone and mythology of Alien: Earth would be more tightly married to that of the first film, Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, than its two prequels, 2012’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. In the prequel series, humanity is in the future—but in many ways it’s just a near-future, one ruled by unscrupulous corporate powers desperate to win the ultimate prize: life, and perhaps even immortality.
The Hybrids Series: Set in 2120, the eight-part series will pick up 2120 two years before the events of the first film. Humanity is still “down on Earth, building a better future for everyone.” But the alien craft (likely those seen ominously arriving in quick succession in the trailer) is not the first that earthlings have encountered recently. It’s far from the first threat they’ve had to deal with. The familiar world of Alien, governed by interplanetary corporations like Weyland-Yutani and humans hell-bent on conquering the unknown, is a place where five total mega-corporations rule supreme. Earth, in the year 2120, is governed by Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold.
This is the Corporate Era of human history. It’s a time when, as the trailer states, the lines “between man and machine are… blurry.” Cyborgs—humans with biological parts replaced by technology—work beside synthetics, humanoid robots with their own A.I. intelligence. But an upset to this balance is about to occur. Driven by ambition and armed with a young, mathematically- and scientifically-gifted Founder/CEO’s scientific breakthrough, the powerful Prodigy Corporation is about to produce a new type of machine. These hybrids, humanoid robots that combine synthetic machinery with actual human consciousness, would be the technological breakthrough of the 21st century, the logical step in a decades-long race to achieve immortality. But nothing in science, in human ambition, is ever simple.
Meet the Hybrids: The first is a “unique” “prototype”: “Wendy,” whose first name and age are about the only things in this hyper-competitive world that humanity hasn’t changed about her. “Born” a genetically engineered adult (played by Sydney Chandler), she’s a childlike blank slate. The result of Prodigy’s “most advanced breakthrough yet,” Wendy has “the body of an adult and the consciousness of a child.”
Soon, however, the quiet of the new world will be disrupted. Outside of the walls of Prodigy City, an accident happens. A Weyland-Yutani spaceship, from what appears to be a new frontier, strikes the ocean before landing in an ocean-side area of the Prodigy metropolis. Inside, something new and entirely alien to Wendy and the other human-looking synthetics/bot-hybrids had just arrived: unknown organic alien life forms, corpses at first, of a previously unknown and unexplored species, far more lethal than humankind ever suspected it had a right to be.
The Alien: Earth Series Cast, in Addition to Sydney Chandler, includes Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, a synthetic mentor and trainer; Alex Lawther as soldier CJ; Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier, a cunning, conniving CEO; Essie Davis as Dame Silvia; Adarsh Gourav as Slightly; Kit Young as Tootles; David Rysdahl as Arthur; Babou Ceesay as Morrow; Jonathan Ajayi as Smee; Erana James as Curly; Lily Newmark as Nibs; Diem Camille as Siberian; and Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins.
Final Trailer, Recap: The Trailer, Published on May 28, is FX and Hulu’s Third Teaser for the Series, Aliens Franchise Fans Have Been Waiting for since First Learning of its Development in 2019
In January, FX and Hulu ran the entire world a first taste of Alien: Earth, dropping a surprise short teaser in the middle of the NFL’s AFC Championship game. The short clip was jarring, to say the least, as it was shot entirely from the xenomorph’s perspective, running on all fours in a corridor as its entire spaceship hurtled through space, heading for Earth. With no dialogue or context to offer, the four-second teaser drew speculation. But in April, the first real trailer for Alien: Earth landed. This longer trailer provided some much-needed clarity to the tenor and the stakes. The first glimpse of the trailer, before the horror set in, looked at the creation of the mysterious “Wendy” in the first half of 2120 on a research island known as Neverland.
As Hawley said when asked about how Alien: Earth was drawing on the mythology of Alien and Prometheus in an interview with Collider in April 2024: “As far as I’m concerned, with the series, we always had to serve a point of view based on how people move. We had to feel as though that film was the end of the line.” The fact that the series’ final trailer has now been released with the sole image of that final frame from the trailer—of an XCOM team member sitting in the lab working on those alien corpses—is very telling. This is not so much an action sci-fi series in the vein of Star Trek, Firefly, or even Blade Runner, but an exercise in dread, in the slow-motion inevitability of events.
