Don’t Expect Ripley to be in FX’s Alien Series

We may not know when the Xenomorphs are coming back to the big screen, but FX is working on a series with showrunner Noah Hawley. We don’t know when we’re going to get our first look, but FX continues to set the stage this new take on the Alien franchise.

Talking to Deadline, FX chief John Landgraf confirms that the FX series will be a prequel, so we shouldn’t expect a character like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley to appear. He explains, “Alien takes place before Ripley. It’s the first story that takes place in the Alien franchise on Earth… So, it takes place on our planet. Right near the end of this century we’re in — so 70-odd years from now.”

Seeing that the Prometheus franchise had just spent two films building up to the classic Xenomorph we see in the movies, I wonder how Hawley plans to tell this story with the traditional alien creature without breaking the established canon.

That being said, Landgraf is confident with how Hawley has been able to tackle spinoffs of established properties. They said, “Noah has this incredible ability, and I think you’ve seen it with Fargo, to both find a way of being faithful, showing fidelity to an original creation like a Coen brothers’ movie, or in this case, Ridley Scott’s and James Cameron’s follow-up, Aliens, but also to bring something new to the table that represents extension and reinvention of a franchise at the same time.”

We don’t know when we’re going to get our first look at FX’s Alien, but hopefully they manage to make the series feel like it’s in the same world as the movies. While Ridley Scott’s film did start out as a sci-fi horror movie, I wish they embraced the existentialist themes that were introduced in Prometheus.

No release date has been set for FX’s Alien.