By Seemingly dormant again following Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox, the “Alien” franchise is about to make a comeback on two fronts.
On the one hand, there’s Fede Alvarez’s new film “Alien: Romulus” which is expected to harken back to the classic formula of the original four films.
On the other hand, there’s a new TV series that hails from “Fargo” and “Legion” creator Noah Hawley. By its nature, a TV series will have to take a different approach to the xenomorphs.
Hawley recently appeared on a panel at the Austin Film Festival (via Slashfilm) where he discussed his approach to the franchise and spoke of the difference between film and television in terms of laying out his story:
“I had some conversations early on with Peter Rice, who used to run all of television at Fox and then the first couple of years at Disney, where it was like – ‘The thing with Alien is, it’s always trapped in a spaceship, trapped in a prison. What if it wasn’t that?’
Look, a two-hour movie, you can set it up and then it’s just about, ‘Are they going to survive?’ But if you’re making a series, ‘Are they going to survive?’, you can’t sustain it. Even if you have 60% of the best action-horror on television, you still have 40% of ‘What are we talking about?’
Things are already being shaken up as this time they’re bringing the creatures to Earth. In doing so there’s plenty of interesting creative terrain for Hawley to explore:
“What is this moment on Earth, technology-wise? And where are we? And the question science-fiction always tends to ask is, does humanity deserve to survive? So that seems like a really interesting question to continue to explore.”
Hawley also says the familiar formula of the films is comparable to the creature itself:
“Then it always mimics the life cycle of the creature, right? Which is egg, slow, Facehugger, starts to get faster — you know what I mean? And of course, that’s great for a horror movie to build that way. So I found a way to kind of innovate around that structure and play with it.”
Filming on the series began in July and has been continuing ever since as the project was shot in the UK with Equity contract actors, thus it remains on track for a release likely in the back half of 2024.
Source: Slashfilm
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