Get Ready, ‘Alien: Earth’ is Bringing Xenomorphs to the Small Screen August 13

If Alien: Romulus reinvigorated a love for Ridley Scott’s famous space horror series, you thankfully won’t have to wait too much longer for the next hit of dopamine. Alien: Earth, set to be the franchise’s first television instalment, is coming on August 13, exclusively on Disney+.

While details are still scant, we do have a full cast, a place in the timeline, a teaser trailer, and some hints to help guide us as we figure out what the show will do with the infamously deadly Xenomorph as it takes its first foray onto our own planet.

Everything We Know About ‘Alien: Earth’

After months of being left in the dark, we finally have a concrete idea of what we’re likely to see when Alien: Earth drops this August.

According to FX the show will follow Wendy (played by Sydney Chandler), the world’s first hybrid android, a humanoid robot infused with a human consciousness rather than artificial intelligence. She, along with a group of soldiers, will encounter “mysterious life forms” after a Weyland-Yutani spaceship crashes into ‘Prodigy City’, unleashing hell on Earth.

I think we all know what at least one of those ‘mysterious life forms’ will be. See, in the trailer above, a voice-over explains that the ship that crashes, which we now know is the USCSS Maginot, is carrying five species of extraterrestrial life. Whether that’s five faceuhggers, five different points in xenomorph biology, or five completely different types of alien, is currently unknown.

Either way, the show will take place in 2120 with Earth governed by five mega-corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. Humans have begun implementing cybernetics into their bodies, whereas more ‘traditional’ synthetic androids—based around A.I.—are common.

Wendy, on the other hand is a hybrid android—a combination of an adult body with a child’s consciousness, apparently, created by the founder and CEO of Prodigy Corporation—and will be protected by android Kirsh, played by Timothy Olyphant.

The show will also depict the beginnings of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation which, if you’ve been following the series, is the mega-corporation that has put a lot of the films’ events into motion. It’ll deal with the technological race to create the kinds of androids shown throughout the series, and will explore the line between human and machine more directly through Wendy’s storyline, the presence of cyborgs, as well as the Alien itself.

It’s very likely that the two major players in this race will be the Weyland Corporation, and the Yutani Corporation. According to the series’ official canon, the pair merged in 2099 to become the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. From there, it got very interested in alien biology, which has led to a lot of bad things happening.

In saying that, FX boss John Landgraf told Deadline that the show would be an “imaginative reimagining”, so official canon might not matter too much.

“It was really fun to watch take on the ‘Alien’ franchise in the way I watched him take on ‘Fargo’, to try to figure out how to deconstruct where the magic of it comes from and what were the key ingredients and how he can deliver those ingredients in a different way without just repeating things that have been done before,” Landgraf said.

Landgraf also said they’re expecting the show to go for at least two seasons, though more are definitely on the cards.

It’s worth noting that Ridley Scott, who directed the first Alien and returned to make Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, had a third movie in that prequel series in mind that would have focused more on the continued growth of David as an AI, and further bridge the gap between Covenant and the original movie.

And wouldn’t you know it, Scott is acting as an executive producer on the show. With any luck we’ll get a bit of that lost story in Alien: Earth, since Scott’s Covenant follow-up has been on ice for some time.

All Confirmed Cast Members

Beyond the speculation, we do already have a good idea of who you’ll be seeing on screen in August.

• Sydney Chandler as Wendy
• Alex Lawther as Hermit
• Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh
• Essie Davis as Dame Sylvia
• Kit Young as Tootles
• Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier
• Adarsh Gourav as Slightly
• Dean Alexandrou as Bergerfeld
• Amir Boutrous as Rahim
• Lloyd Everitt as Hoyt
• Moe Bar-El as Rashidi
• Sandra Yi Sencindiver as Yutani
• David Rysdahl as Arthur Sylvia
• Erana James as Curly
• Babou Ceesay as Morrow
• Diêm Camille as Siberian
• Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins
• Lily Newmark as Nibs
• Johnathan Ajayi as Smee

Where and When does ‘Alien: Earth’ Take Place?

This might be a surprise, but Alien: Earth is going to take place on Earth.

This is actually a bigger deal than you’d think, as despite the original film launching in 1979 (yep, 46 years ago), we actually haven’t seen a canonical view of our own planet in the series. No, the Alien vs. Predator movies don’t count.

Also, though the series has jumped around quite a bit in terms of the timeline, it actually only occurs over the course of about 300 years. Alien: Earth will be set near the beginning of the timeline, far closer to the original movie than was initially rumoured. Here’s the timeline of the Alien series:

• Prometheus: 2089 – 2093
• Alien: Covenant: 2104
• Alien: Earth: 2120
• Alien: 2122
• Alien: Romulus: 2142
• Aliens: 2179
• Alien 3: 2179
• Alien: Resurrection: 2381

With any luck, we’ll see some explanation of just what happens between the events of Prometheus, Covenant and Alien: Earth, but that’ll maybe happen in a later season.

When is ‘Alien: Earth’ Coming Out?

FX have finally announced when we’ll see our own blue marble reflected in the Alien franchise: August 13, 2025, with episodes launching on Disney+ each Wednesday.