The Alien franchise is in such an odd place at the moment as nothing seems to be in the works on the film side, a streaming series is rumored to be in the works but nothing concrete has been announced. Disney and 21st Century Fox are expected to finalize their merger with properties like Alien will likely get some reevaluation from Emma Watts and Alan Horn.
Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant seeming pumped the breaks on both Alien 5 and due to its underwhelming box office Alien: Awakening. Giving more incentive to keep the Alien universe alive is potentially considering a series to reignite the franchise with new and interesting stories/characters. FX and Hulu could be excellent places for it unless they decide to lease the franchise out to Netflix or Amazon.
One way to go with a series so it doesn’t become repeative is taking cues from the fantastic anthology series Black Mirror.
Using Black Mirror as a template could allow an Alien universe series with varying themes that are connected by the company also known as the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. The many off-world colonies and the company basically having a role in every single operation could give wiggle room to explore many many different kinds of science fiction stories, and expanding beyond the xenomorph.
You have plenty of things you could cover including the many colonies, our favorites the Colonial Marines, prisons, mining operations, terraforming, surveying new planets, androids, cloning, brothels, company weapons programs, wars, politics, new aliens/threats, and even what Earth might look like in this universe (something we haven’t exactly seen in any great depth). It is a good avenue to adapt the comic book and video game stories like Alien: Isolation/Alien: Defiance into live-action incarnations that might have a harder time to get features.
Anthologies allow new voices to add their own twist on a genre giving some new lifeblood to a 40-year-old franchise like Alien. There is also the possibility that certain popular episodes could be spun off into their own feature films.
A list of film directors I’d love to see get involved with a series like this would include Alex Garland, Jonathan Glazer, Reed Morano, Jordan Peele, Denis Villeneuve, Neill Blomkamp, Bong Joon-ho, Matt Reeves, Alfonso Cuaron, Lynne Ramsey, Karyn Kusama, Susanne Bier, Cary Fukunaga, David Gordon Green, Steve McQueen, Ben Wheatley, Leigh Whannell, Duncan Jones, and Julius Avery.
We likely won’t know for sure what is coming ahead for the Alien universe until after the merger but there is at least some potential beyond the movies.
