When Ellen Ripley said “Get away from her, you bitch,” she apparently wasn’t talking about the latest Alien movie. Turns out, Fede Alvarez’s 2024 Alien movie is actually much, much closer to the originals than anyone could’ve guessed.
Rumored to be called Alien: Romulus, and currently scheduled for release on August 16, 2024, the film stars Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla, Pacific Rim Uprising) and Isabela Merced, and that’s kind of everything we’ve known about it for a while. In a new interview though, Spaeny revealed the time period the film is set in and, frankly, is a little surprising.
“It’s supposed to slot in between the first movie and the second movie,” Spaeny told Variety this week. “They brought the same team from Aliens, the James Cameron film. The same people who built those xenomorphs actually came on and built ours. So getting to see the original design with the original people who have been working on these films for 45-plus years and has been so much of their life has been really incredible.”
Fans of the Alien franchise know that a lot of time passes between Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien and James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is off in hyperspace during that time, and when she wakes up learns she’s been there for 57 years. Over those nearly six decades, the planet her crew landed on—LV-426, the one with all the alien eggs—was populated as part of a larger terraforming mission. Could Alien: Romulus tell some aspect of that story? Or will it just be in that time somewhere else the xenomorphs exist?
That much, we don’t know. But with Noah Hawley’s Alien show taking place much closer to modern times, one may have expected Alvarez to similarly move away from the films. Apparently, he hasn’t, and that could be a blessing or a curse. We’ll find out next year.
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