MOVIE NEWS – Alien: Earth, the prequel spinoff of Ridley Scott’s iconic sci-fi horror saga, lands on FX and Hulu August 12, but a lucky crowd at San Diego Comic-Con just got the first glimpse. Series creator Noah Hawley and his cast appeared in Hall H to screen the premiere and share behind-the-scenes insights. The show promises new creatures and characters, offering a bold new perspective on the Alien mythos.

Alien: Earth, the prequel series to Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror franchise, is set to premiere August 12 on FX and Hulu. On July 25, Comic-Con attendees in San Diego got a sneak preview, as the show’s first episode was screened for fans. Creator Noah Hawley and the cast appeared in Hall H to introduce the series and answer questions about what sets it apart from the movies. Alien: Earth will distinguish itself with new monsters and original characters, reshaping the established Alien universe.

As Deadline reported, Hawley felt honored to take on the challenge of creating an Alien series, especially one that radically shifts the story’s setting—this time, as the title suggests, to Earth itself. Hawley praised Scott’s original films and how formative they were for him: “I have a relationship with the movies that I adapt at this point, and I do it from a place of love. These are movies that I loved [and] were very formative for me, and so it’s been such a joy when you walk onto that set the first time of the Maginot, which was built literally to the specifications of Ridley’s Nostromo, it really collapses time.”

Hawley is known for genre-bending work—shows like Fargo and Legion prove he’s not afraid to put his own twist on beloved material. Alien: Earth is no different: Hawley wants to recapture the wonder and terror of the original films, this time by introducing new characters:
“The one feeling you can’t get back from watching the original Alien is the discovery of the life cycle of this creature, how it starts as an egg, and it ends up as a 10-foot-tall Xenomorph, and every step along the way is worse than the one before.
So the only way to create that feeling was to introduce new characters, and you don’t know how they breed or what they eat, so you can get back to that feeling of genetic revulsion that we all felt watching Alien for the first time. Obviously, it was a huge responsibility to try to follow in those footsteps of H.R. [Giger] and Ridley [Scott] and that team, but, you know, I always like the risk.”

The Character Study in This Thing Is So Phenomenal

Timothy Olyphant appeared on the Hall H panel with co-stars Samuel Blenkin, Babou Ceesay, Sydney Chandler, and Alex Lawther to discuss the show. The Justified and Deadwood star said he was excited about Alien: Earth not only for its horror, but also its “phenomenal character study” in the tradition of Hawley’s Fargo:
“The things that wake you up in the middle of the night that you’re thinking about the next day are just scenes between two people, and they’re so riveting. In addition to all the thrills and the scares and the drama, the character study in this thing is so phenomenal.”

Hawley emphasized that, above all, Alien: Earth is a drama: “Each hour has to build and have its horror elements, but my feeling is that it really just has to work as a drama, and then all the genre elements can be built on top of that. An Alien movie is a two-hour survival story, and a television show has to be more than that. It has to be a character journey, thematically rich and in which you really start to worry that I might kill some of these people, and I might. You’ll have to tune in and see.”

Source: Deadline