New Alien movie starts filming this month

(Image credit: Sega)

In case you missed it, last year a new Alien movie was announced, and not another prequel this time. It's to be directed by Fede Álvarez, who directed the 2013 Evil Dead and 2016 horror movie Don't Breathe, and will have Ridley Scott, director of the original Alien, as an executive producer. It's being made for Hulu, but beyond that not much was known about it until now.

As The Hollywood Reporter announced, this fifth Alien movie—not counting prequels and crossovers—will begin filming on March 9 in Budapest. It's apparently going to stand alone from the previous movies rather than dragging Ellen Ripley back for another go-around, and will focus on a group of young people stuck in a colony on a distant world. Presumably, with at least one xenomorph. Alvarez co-wrote the script with Rodo Sayagues, who collaborated with him on both his previous movies.

It'll star Cailee Spaeny from Pacific Rim Uprising and The Craft: Legacy, alongside David Jonsson (Industry), Archie Renaux (Shadow and Bone), Spike Fearn (Tell Me Everything), Aileen Wu (Closing Doors), and Isabela Merced, who played Dora the Explorer in the live-action movie Dora and the Lost City of Gold.

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Meanwhile, a TV show based on Alien is also in the works with Noah Hawley, showrunner of the Fargo series. That one won't be continuing Ripley's story either, and will be a prequel set on Earth close to the end of the 21st century. (The original Alien is set in 2122, while most of the first prequel movie, Prometheus takes place in 2093, with the second, Alien: Covenant, picking up in 2104.)

Back in 2015 it was revealed that Neill Blomkamp, director of District 9 and fan of Alien: Isolation, had pitched an Alien movie to be set after Aliens that would have ignored the events of Alien 3. Unfortunately Fox didn't approve the project and it never made it to the script stage.

On the videogame side of things, we're expecting Aliens: Dark Descent to release in 2023. A top-down real-time squad shooter from Tindalos Interactive, developer of Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2, it looks a lot like Alien Swarm minus the co-op.

There's also Aliens, a singleplayer Unreal Engine 5 action-horror game set between the first two movies. That one's being developed by Survios, the studio behind The Walking Dead Onslaught and Creed: Rise to Glory, and will apparently be playable in VR and on a flat screen. A release date has yet to be announced.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.