Last we heard, progress was being made on FX's planned Alien TV series, with a tentative late 2022 start-date penciled in. However, our latest update on the project may disappoint fans hoping to see the show premiere by 2023.
According to Deadline, even though showrunner Noah Hawley has now handed in all of his scripts, production is not scheduled to get underway until next year. So while there is still a chance the show will air late 2023, 2024 is looking more likely.
There's been some speculation that Sigourney Weaver might reprise her iconic role as Ellen Ripley, but FX chief John Landgraf definitively stated that the legendary sci-fi heroine will not appear during a recent interview. In fact, the series takes place long before The Nostromo set down on LV-426 in Ridley Scott's original film.
“There are some big surprises in store for the audience,” said the network boss. “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.”
“Ripley won’t be a part of it or any of the other characters of Alien other than the alien itself,” he added.
This news won't come as much of a shock to anyone who's been keeping an eye on this show's development, but is sure to disappoint fans who were hoping to see Weaver return. The decision to set the series so close to our own timeline has also proved to be divisive since Scott's prequel film, Prometheus, already established the origin of the Xenomorph.
The actual premise of the show does sound interesting, but fans who prefer the more claustrophobic chills of the original films might be dismayed to hear that the show will focus more on the advancements in AI and a race to create cutting edge androids (sorry, Bishop... artificial persons) than acid-secreting creatures chasing crew members through dimly-lit corridors.
"It's set on Earth of the future. At this moment, I describe that as Edison versus Westinghouse versus Tesla," Hawley explained to Esquire earlier this year. "Someone's going to monopolize electricity. We just don't know which one it is ... In the movies, we have this Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which is clearly also developing artificial intelligence-but what if there are other companies trying to look at immortality in a different way, with cyborg enhancements or transhuman downloads? Which of those technologies is going to win?"