New ‘Alien’ Movie Headed to Hulu From Fede Álvarez, With Ridley Scott Producing

Your love-hate of the Prometheus movies won’t scare Ridley Scott off from making another installment in the Alien franchise. The Hollywood Reporter reports Scott is set to produce a new standalone version of Alien, written and directed by Fede Álvarez for Hulu.

Alvarez just wrote and produced Netflix’s new take on Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and had made his feature directorial debut in 2014 by rebooting Evil Dead. He also wrote/directed an original horror flick, Don’t Breathe, which spawned a sequel last year.

His Alien project apparently won’t be entirely connected to the previous films, although bringing Scott back into the mix should mean it’ll at least fit tonally. Scott directed the original 1979 film starring Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, the lone survivor when her ship has its first too-close encounter with a “Xenomorph.” Three movie sequels followed, plus two cross-over battles for Alien vs. Predator, before Scott returned to the franchise for his two prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.

Meanwhile, FX is still working on an Alien-centric TV series with Noah Hawley, with Ridley Scott also involved. At last month’s Television Critics Association tour, FX honcho John Landgraf stated that the series — which will take place on Earth, before all the other Alien movies — probably won’t premiere until 2023, the earliest. At the current time, Hawley will first have to film a new season of Fargo at the end of this year before he can go into production on Alien, though Landgraf added that at least five scripts for the prequel series were already written at the time of the TCA tour.

Alvarez’s Alien film is part of a plan by 20th Century Studios to produce 10 new original films a year to bolster Hulu’s original programming. 20th Century picked up the project “purely off the strength of Fede’s pitch,” division president Steve Asbell told THR. “It was just a really good story with a bunch of characters you haven’t seen before.”