Everything You Need To Know About Alien: Earth — The Franchise’s Most Ambitious Series Yet

Alien: Earth brings new horrors and bigger questions to the iconic sci-fi franchise.

Alien: Romulus debuted in 2024 and quickly became one of the year’s most acclaimed and terrifying horror films. Starring Cailee Spaeny, the movie delivered intense action, shocking visuals, and a fresh addition to the long-running Alien franchise. Now, fans won’t have to wait long—2025 brings Alien: Earth, an all-new TV series expanding the canon in bold ways. Here’s everything you need to know about the terrifying new chapter in the Alien universe.

The Plot behind Alien: Earth

A hybrid girl. A crashed ship. And monsters that weren’t supposed to be real. Meet Wendy, played by the magnetic Sydney Chandler—a being caught between synthetic circuitry and a human soul. Transferred into a synthetic body, she thought the procedure, while successful, wouldn’t lead her into any danger. But she was far from right. And when the USCSS Maginot, a doomed Weyland-Yutani vessel, nosedives into Prodigy City—Earth’s glittering, corporate-controlled neon skyline—it tears open not just buildings, but an ancient terror. Xenomorphs and… something new. Five new somethings, actually.

One slithers like death from ceilings. One watches through sheep. And all of these new creatures will have you gripping your armrests from your homes, just like in the theaters for the films of the franchise. The upcoming FX series will take place in 2120, two years before the events of the original film Alien, which takes place in 2122, and 22 years before Alien: Romulus, set in 2142.

Noah Hawley’s Vision for the Series

It has also been confirmed by Noah Hawley that the events of the prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant will be ignored. Alien: Earth is still canon, still claustrophobic, but cracked wide open with philosophical teeth. It’s a war between body and machine, flesh and profit, survival and soul.

Who else is in Alien: Earth

The ensemble cast adds excitement, with Sydney Chandler’s Wendy mentored by Kirsh, a synthetic played by Timothy Olyphant. Kirsh’s calm presence hides deeper secrets that will unravel as the series progresses. Alex Lawther, from The End of The F**ing World*, joins the cast as CJ, a key figure in the unfolding story. Other cast members include Samuel Blenkin as Boy Cavalier, Essie Davis as Dame Sylvia, and Adarsh Gourav as Slightly. Kit Young also stars as Tooties, helping build a world full of tension, mystery, and shocking betrayals. Expect conflicting loyalties, hidden agendas—and terrifying beings unlike anything seen before.

Noah Hawley had spoken to SFX magazine on bringing in new creatures and cast into the plot, explaining, “On some level, the most critical feeling that you get from seeing Alien for the first time is the one that’s impossible to recreate, which is the discovery of the life cycle of this creature. Every time you think that you know what this monster is, it changes into something worse. You can’t ever get back with those creatures. But if I bring in new creatures, you don’t know how they reproduce, what they eat, how they’re parasites.”

What elevates the series is its moral weight: it asks whether humanity deserves to survive when it sows such darkness. Hawley frames this not only as a horror story, but as a meditation on corporate biopower, hybrid consciousness, and the commodification of identity.

There are moments in the series—so the early press hints—where governance, technology, and synthetic sentience form grotesque alliances, spawning places like gestation labs disguised as schools or containment zones that double as economic zones. It isn’t filled with cheap thrills, but philosophical horror masked in practical FX dread.