The Alien franchise has been one of the most iconic and influential series in film, and probably the only franchise with some of the best directors in Hollywood attached to it: Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet made the first four films. Alien also crafted one of cinema’s most iconic movie monsters, the Xenomorph, more commonly known as simply: the alien. The franchise began in 1979, and in the 43 years since, the film has spawned three sequels, two prequels, two crossover films, multiple video games, and comics, with two high-profile Alien projects are on the way in the near future. One is a television series for FX from Fargo creator Noah Hawley, while the other is a feature film set to premiere on Hulu from Don’t Breathe director Fede Alverez.

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Across six films, and two crossover films with another franchise, the Alien movies show humanity leaving Earth and finding the horrors of what lies in the dark corners of space (“where no one can hear you scream,” as the legendary tagline reads). They explore humanity’s quest to understand creation, and the cyclical nature between creation and destruction. When lost in the coldness of space, will humanity find its way home, or is it destined to destroy itself?

To follow humanity’s journey with the Xenomorphs throughout a story that spans 275 years, here are the Alien films in chronological order.

Alien Movies In Chronological Order

  • Alien vs. Predator Aliens vs Predator: Requiem Prometheus Alien: Covenant Alien Aliens Alien 3 Alien: Resurrection

Or if you’d prefer, here’s how to watch the Alien movies by order of release date.

Alien vs. Predator

     20th Century Fox

While it is debatable if the film takes place in the proper Alien timeline, if it is more connected to Predator, or if it is in its own separate timeline altogether, Alien vs. Predator and its sequel do occupy an interesting place for the franchise. If treated as the starting point, it becomes the catalyst of the central drive for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in the franchise. The movie is set in 2004, one of the few Alien films to take place in the contemporary present day.

Alien vs. Predator follows a group of scientists employed by the Weyland Corporation who discover a pyramid in the arctic. When they arrive, the humans find themselves caught in the middle of an ancient feud between the two titular monsters, and eventually must team up with the Predators when they realize the threat the alien Xenomorphs pose to the planet if they are unleashed. The film ends with the alien force defeated, and the fallen Predator taken aboard his ship, but before the credits roll an alien bursts out of the dead Predator’s chest, revealing a mandible variant of the classic creature, one of the scariest extraterrestrial monsters in movies.

Alien vs Predator introduced the idea that Predators have been coming to Earth for thousands of years and were worshiped as gods, and Predators looking to grow into manhood would hunt Xenomorphs, who were bred with ancient sacrifices. This ancient alien plot line is deepened in Prometheus, as it is revealed humans themselves were created by an alien race, the Engineers. Putting the two films in the same universe suggests a vast canvas of alien life, with humanity a testing ground for multiple factions. While both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant tries to establish that this is the first creation of the Xenomorph, ancient writings on the walls of the Engineer ship in Prometheus suggest the Engineers had created the creatures before, which allows room for interpretation that Alien Vs. Predator can still exist alongside the events established later on.

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

Picking up right after the events of Alien vs Predator in the year 2004, Aliens vs Predator: Requiem features the Predator-alien hybrid, named the Pred-alien, breaking loose on the Predator ship and sending it crashing near the forest in Colorado and causing havoc on a small town. One lone Predator is sent to kill the creature while the townspeople try to escape with their lives. The movie ends with the alien force being wiped out with a nuclear bomb, and the threat supposedly defeated.

The movie’s ending has big implications for the Alien franchise, as the movie ends with the Predator’s shoulder cannon in the hands of Ms. Yutani, whose Yutani Corporation will eventually merge with Weyland Corporation in the previous film to become the overarching central human threat of the series, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It appears with the Predator’s weapon in their hands, they now have the technology and knowledge of life beyond the stars that will drive them for the next 100 years.

Prometheus

Jumping ahead in the timeline 89 years into the future of 2093, Prometheus follows the crew of the titular spaceship using a star map discovered among the artifacts of several ancient Earth cultures in a quest to understand the origins of humanity. The crew lands on alien planet LV-223 and uncovers an alien race that could threaten the entire galaxy. The movie ends with the only human survivor, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (an excellent Noomi Rapace) and the severed head of the android David (the always brilliant Michael Fassbender) as they take the Engineer ship looking for answers as to why the aliens wanted to destroy humanity.

While the film avoided including a full-on Xenomorph, plenty of alien-looking creatures were featured throughout, and one eventually burst out of an Engineers’ chest, signifying what the real threat is. Released in 2012, Prometheus retroactively establishes points that will become major factors in the Alien franchise with the relationship between creator and creation at the heart of it, something further elaborated on with the various androids. The movie also shows the Engineers (who were for years known as Space Jockey’s to fans) and hint at the prototype for what will become the Xenomorph, here hinted as a biological weapon meant to destroy a civilization.

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Alien: Covenant

Set 11 years after Prometheus, Alien: Covenant takes place in the year 2104 and focuses on the crew of a colony ship that lands on an uncharted planet investigating a distress signal and encounter the android David, now fully rebuilt, only to discover that they may have been lured into a trap and come face to face with David’s horrifying creation of a prototype Xenomorph. David reveals he created the creatures by experimenting with the deadly pathogen created by the Engineers that he himself used to wipe that master alien race out. David now sees humanity as a flawed creature and his experiment is a perfect creation, one that can destroy humanity for good.

The film ends with David, having a whole ship of humans to experiment on, placing two of his alien embryos with the frozen human embryos before he begins examining humans on which he will conduct more experiments, likely an attempt to create his perfect weapon of mass destruction: the Xenomorph. The Engineers created humanity, humanity creates David, and David creates the creature that could be the cause of their destruction, creating a cycle of death and destruction.

Alien

The first film released in the franchise, Alien takes place in the year 2122, about 18 years after the events of Alien: Covenant and 29 years after Prometheus. The plot of Alien features the crew of the commercial space tug Nostromo who, when they land on the planet LV-426, encounter the dangerous Xenomorph alien that begins killing off members of the crew in its various stages from face-hugger, to chest-burster, to full-grown alien. As a result, some of the most unforgettable scenes from the Alien franchise occur in this original masterpiece.

The entire crew is killed, with only Sigourney Weaver’s strong Ellen Ripley surviving after having ejected the alien monster out of an airlock. She enters cryostasis at the end of the film, hoping to return to Earth, but her trip will take a tragic and unexpected turn.

The movie sees Ripley and her crew encountering the remains of the Engineers, and suggests that, in the time gap between Alien: Covenant and Alien, David perfected his alien monster into a new deadly force. However, due to the events in both the Alien vs Predator films and Prometheus, the Weyland-Yutani corporation is aware enough of the creature’s existence to go looking for it. This film also marks the importance of Ripley in the timeline, for she was the face of the franchise moving forward (or in real-world order of release, was the face of the franchise for almost two decades).

Aliens

57 years after Alien, in the year 2079, Aliens begins with Ripley’s cryopod being discovered adrift in space. LV-426 has been colonized since she went into cryosleep, but once transmissions have been lost, Ripley agrees to return to the planet with a group of space marines to investigate. Once on the planet, they realize that it’s become overrun with Xenomorphs and must fight to survive, producing some of the most memorable scenes from any Alien film. Ripley finds one survivor, a young girl named Newt, and Ripley fights back against the creatures that killed her crew before they threaten to take away a new life for herself.

As James Cameron’s action-packed follow-up to Ridley Scott’s film, Aliens introduces a lot of important elements into the Alien mythology, the most important one being the alien queen, which is in the timeline audiences saw in Alien vs Predator but is further explained here. It also introduces the android Bishop, played by Lance Henriksen, who played the founder of the Weyland Corporation in Alien vs Predator, suggesting the android was designed to resemble the company’s founder, a storyline that is further detailed in Alien 3.

Alien 3

Alien 3 takes place shortly after the events of Aliens and begins with an alien egg hatching aboard the ship, with a face-hugger being released. This causes a fire to start, and for the ship to release the escape pod containing the cryo chambers of Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and the android Bishop. The pod crashes on a prison planet, Fiorina “Fury” 161, housing a colony populated by violent male inmates. Ripley and the Xenomorph are the only survivors of the crash, and Ripley later discovers that a second face-hugger was on board, and that she was implanted with the embryo of an alien queen. Showing why Ellen Ripley is celebrated, Weaver’s character sacrifices herself so that the Weyland-Yutani corporation can never get their hands on the embryo and turn it into a weapon.

In many ways, Alien 3 could be seen as the satisfying end to the journey, as the film closes out the central Weyland-Yutani story: Bishop II (Lance Henriksen) is revealed as Bishop’s creatorm and is killed before he can get the alien queen embryo growing inside Ripley. Yet even with the Weyland-Yutani corporation threat gone and Ripley finally at peace, the overarching story of humanity returning home still needs to be resolved.

Alien: Resurrection

Taking place in the far future of 2279, two hundred years after the events of Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection follows a clone of Ripley named Ripley-8 that was grown by the United Systems Military on the space vessel USM Auriga. The clone is mixed with Xenomorph queen DNA, and the scientist uses the clone to grow their own alien queen to study the aliens. When the Xenomorphs escape their captivity, Ripley teams up with a team of mercenaries to destroy the ship before it reaches Earth.

While Alien: Resurrection was not the final film in the series, later films decide to tell prequel stories, making this the end of the journey chronologically. Yet with Alien: Resurrection ending with Ripley-8 having defeated the alien, the character is able to do what her predecessor couldn’t: return to Earth and start a new life. In a franchise that took place with humanity looking for answers among the stars, it only makes thematic sense for the final film to feature humanity’s return to Earth.

Alien Film Series By Release Date

While chronological order is a fun viewing method to see how different films made from different time periods can intersect with one another, there is also the way of viewing them how general audiences saw them: by order of release date. As elements like the alien queen, which are introduced in Aliens, are explained in more detail than in Alien vs Predator, which was released later and suspects that the audience has a sort of passing knowledge. Watching them by order of release date lets the audience know what the filmmakers know at the time of these movies release. Therefore, here are the Alien movies in order of release.

  • Alien - May 25, 1977 Aliens - July 18, 1986 Alien 3 - May 22, 1992 Alien: Resurrection - November 26, 1997 Alien vs Predator - August 13, 2004 Aliens vs Predator: Requiem - December 25, 2007 Prometheus - June 8, 2012 Alien: Covenant - May 19, 2017

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