Alien: Earth: Five Corporations, One Deadly Alien Threat

FX and Hulu’s Alien: Earth has been a long time coming. Originally set to debut last year, the prequel series’ streaming release date has been pushed back to August 12, 2025. In the months leading up to the Alien franchise’s return, the platforms have given fans a series of glimpses at what’s to come in the form of a series of trailers and showrunner Noah Hawley’s directorial debut in a teaser pilot. FX and Hulu just released the series’ latest trailer ahead of its August release date, which fans are already dying to see. The full trailer—which is followed by an extended synopsis of the first three episodes—is both atmospheric and familiar, building upon Hawley’s previous Alien teaser trailer with an 18-minute glimpse of what’s in store for viewers when the show begins streaming. While previous clips teed up what looks to be a series full of horror elements, the new footage is interspersed with sequences that have a meditative, almost existential quality to them. Short clips of inexplicable alien vessels floating through space give way to bodies on the ground in shadowy corridors, hands and feet scrambling for purchase, humans in bloody mire attempting to outrun something that looks too much like a xenomorph in the distance, the creature lurking in darkness, framed at a distance as if by fate.

Noah Hawley, whose work on Breaking Bad, Legion, and Fargo, as well as directing the first teaser trailer, has a reputation for taking a more deliberate, considered approach to world-building and character development. He’s noted in past interviews that the show would likely stick closer to the Alien (1979) created by Ridley Scott in terms of tone and mythology as opposed to the Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant prequels by other creators. Alien: Earth is set in 2120, two years before the events of the first Alien film, where the world is on the brink of a new age, not so far in the future that technology and the way corporations wield it can’t be immediately relatable to how we live our lives now. In Alien: Earth, the Earth of 2120 is a world divided not between competing governments or nations but rather between five mega-corporations vying for control over what remains the greatest and most important prize for humanity: life and potentially the immortality that comes with it.

A New Dawn, A Race for Immortality, and The Hybrids

On the planet Earth in the year 2120, corporations Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold have superseded the influence and power of governments and nation-states. The year 2120 is, in short, the Corporate Era, a period of history when both cyborgs (humans with augmented mechanical and artificial parts) and synthetics (humanoid robots driven by hyper-evolved AI) are commonplace. These forces are put into a new power imbalance when Prodigy Corporation’s young Founder and CEO devises a radical evolution of synthetics into something new: a humanoid robot that uses real human brains and consciousness. The prototype for these creations is Wendy, “with the body of an adult and the consciousness of a child,” played by Sydney Chandler. Wendy’s arrival is not so much the dawn of a new era of synthetic evolution as it is the kickoff to the greatest race for immortality of them all, between the five corporate leaders in an attempt to evolve and replicate the best of humanity in a new form.

Wendy and a handful of her hybrid counterparts’ training and education are upended when a spaceship belonging to Weyland-Yutani Corporation collides and crashes on Prodigy City. When Wendy and a few of her hybrid brethren are sent into the wreckage, they discover alien organic lifeforms and become infected with what is, by all accounts and to no surprise to those familiar with the Alien franchise, much worse than any other alien and even human lifeforms that humans have been in contact with before. Shot almost entirely from alien perspectives, the initial trailer launched with no background context for viewers, seemingly establishing the show and setting up a world that could be its entity or that could be some work of science fiction by offering only glimpses of the new Alien world. As described in the trailers and above synopsis, Alien: Earth combines elements that previous Alien films and TV series have foregone for newer, more expensive-looking set pieces and epic showdowns by harkening back to the classic elements of the film the prequel series is named for.

Hawley and company have been giving fans both Alien newbies and franchise vets a clearer sense of what to expect from Alien: Earth, gradually revealing more of the story that began in the show’s first teaser trailer with a shot from a xenomorph’s perspective traveling down a spacecraft corridor. The craft is barreling toward Earth, collision course set for an atmosphere that couldn’t be more ready to receive its new alien guest. The minute-long clip, which premiered during the AFC Championship game in the NFL playoffs in January, set fans on fire. In the lead-up to Alien: Earth’s August release, FX and Hulu released a first trailer at the end of May that offered the first contextual clues at what the show would entail: after showing scenes of Wendy’s creation in 2120 at Neverland Research Island, a capsule crewed by a human astronaut and a synthetic researcher crash lands on an alien spaceship off the coast of Neverland.