If there’s one thing I can say about this franchise, it’s that the marketing never, ever misses.
Covenant poster is a thing of beauty.If there’s one thing I can say about this franchise, it’s that the marketing never, ever misses.
Seriously. There has never been a bad poster, even with the worst films.
Both of them are.Covenant poster is a thing of beauty.
Getting big Roy Batty vibes from Timothy Olyphant’s character. Considering Alien and Blade Runner we’re both directed by Ridley Scott, probably intentional.
If AVP were canon, this would take the wind out of this premise sails.![]()
I guess because they hybrids, in robot bodies and they never age?Wendy, Curly and Nibs are all character names from Peter Pan.![]()
As Hawley emphasized during our group set visit interview, Alien: Earth is most heavily influenced by Alien and Aliens, and he wanted to hold tight to the most iconic qualities of the Xenomorph from those films. “In the design phase with Wētā, I didn't want to mess with the silhouette of the creature at all.”
While a priority was keeping the Xenomorph design “classic,” Hawley and co. did seize some opportunities to experiment.
The team found more room to play when it came to the color of the Xenomorph. Hawley explained, “It's very black in the movie. I wanted to play into more of the bug-like quality of it, so maybe it falls a little more in the roach coloration.”“I always felt like it was the least effective when it looked like a guy in a suit. You know what I mean? So there are elements, like in the classic, there's just this big ribcage, which feels very human to me, so I wanted to try to minimize that and play around with some other ideas.”
While the Alien franchise has featured some top-tier visual effects over the years and Alien: Earth does involve CG in post-production, Gonzales made a point to emphasize, "We don't have any CG Xenomorph. It’s 100% real." He continued:
“And the Facehuggers we have, they're all real. I don't know how many we have, but we have many Facehuggers that do different things. So there are mostly real creatures. I think [it's] the fact that Wētā built these incredible characters that do several things really well that we can see them longer. Even the eggs are quite sophisticated, and we can show them. I think that's gonna be the strength of the show, especially to have eight hours of that compared to an hour and a half movie and, like you said, four minutes. I don't know our running time of creatures, but it's going to be quite a bit.”
Thus far, the Alien franchise has largely focused on humans and synthetics (humanoid robots with artificial intelligence). However, Alien: Earth will heavily incorporate two other types of beings - cyborgs, humans with biological and artificial parts, and also hybrids, humanoid robots infused with human consciousness, like Sydney Chandler’s Wendy. With four human or human-like beings in play, how much time will that leave for the Xenomorphs? Hawley promises, “It leaves a lot of time, honestly.” Incorporating them into the series demanded a significant amount of time on the filming schedule, but Hawley and co. were committed to it.
Gonzales teased the early episode roadmap, offering a sense of when you can expect the series to go especially big in the action department. As he explained, Episode 1 will deliver a “massive event” and introduce some of the key characters, but from there, Episodes 2 and 3, which he directs, will see those characters grow and become immersed in the action. “There's been a little bit of a rewrite between 2 and 3.” Gonzales continued, “Two used to be super massive. Now 2 and 3 are both massive.” And then came the money quote; “There's a lot of Xenomorph activity going on wall-to-wall.” He also teased, “Two and 3, I can tell you, are massive episodes. One, 2 and 3 together are going to be unbelievable.”“We have some very big set pieces that require a kind of disproportionate amount of our shooting schedule compared to the amount of screen time. You just have to work all that stuff into it.”
While Gonzales wouldn’t go as far as giving us a Xenomorph count for Alien: Earth, he did promise, “We're seeing more Xenomorph than any of these movies.” He continued:
“All the movies, if you really study them, are like, 20 frame, two seconds, they show the Xenomorph. We have huge sequences where all you're seeing is the Xenomorph. It’s driving a lot of things. We have a pretty incredible performer that's doing it and a great stunt team. We're asking them to do a lot. Again, it’s finding the balance of how that works, because seriously, [nothing] in the franchise has shown as much as we have.”
“I think we exist somewhere around Aliens, around the James Cameron story. I haven’t had to get crazy specific with it, but the events of the first film are referenced in the show at some point. So, I think it's somewhere around the events of the second film, either before or just after.”
I think about that Twilight Zone episode where there's the kid who has all the powers, and everyone around him has to act like all they want to do is make him happy and keep him happy. There's something so awful about having to please someone who doesn't have a rational view of the world, or is subject to whims. So, I think that's the spin on it that we brought to it, and that the Weyland-Yutani side is more of that corporate identity.”