Exclusive: New Alien Series In Development, Michael Fassbender And Katherine Waterston In Talks To Return
We've learned that a second Alien series is in development, separate from Noah Hawley's, with Michael Fassbender and Katherine Waterston in talks to reprise their roles from Ridley Scott's prequels.
Why make just one Alien series when you can make two for… well however much they cost? Our trusted and proven sources have told us that a second show is in development with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant stars Michael Fassbender and Katherine Waterston in talks to reprise their prequel roles. Unlike the series Noah Hawley is working on, Ridley Scott will be more directly involved with this project.
It makes sense that Scott would want to return to the prequel narrative he began with 2012’s Prometheus. The film is set 29 years before the events of 1979’s Alien. Its 2017 sequel, Alien: Covenant, ends on a cliffhanger, but after the film’s underperformance at the box office, the series ended without the third installment Scott had been planning.
Michael Fassbender’s talks to join the Alien series are particularly telling, considering what Scott previously said about his plans for the third sequel. In a 2017 podcast interview, via IndieWire, Scott said he wanted Alien: Covenant 2 to focus less on the monstrous xenomorphs and more on the androids and other forms of artificial intelligence in the narrative. Perhaps this second Alien TV series will follow a similar trajectory.
While of course it’s the nigh-unstoppable xenomorphs and the terrifying face-huggers that are the signature antagonists of the Alien film series, humanity’s relationship with artificial intelligence is a recurring theme in the movies. There is at least one android in every single canonical Alien film; sometimes they’re villains, sometimes they’re heroes, and often their synthetic nature is a secret. Not to mention that in the first film, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and her doomed crew are issued orders by the computer known only as Mother (voiced by the late Helen Horton).
Artificial intelligence is also a favorite subject of Ridley Scott’s outside of the Alien series. He explored the issue in 1982’s Blade Runner and will be returning to that franchise to explore it again in the upcoming Amazon Prime series Blade Runner 2099. More recently, there was the excellent HBO Max series Raised by Wolves — one of the streamer’s first originals — which was sadly cut short after its second season.
It will be interesting to see how Scott’s Alien series interacts with Hawley’s. Assuming the series Michael Fassbender and Katherine Waterston are in talks to join is a continuation of Alien: Covenant, they probably won’t have very much to do with one another. Covenant begins in the year 2104 while Hawley’s show will be set before any of the films, in 2089 (Prometheus is mostly set four years later, in 2093).
When we know more about this second Alien series we’ll make sure you know. In the meantime, it was only a couple of weeks ago that we exclusively reported that Sydney Chandler (Don’t Worry Darling) had been cast as the female lead of Hawley’s show, and that report was quickly confirmed.
