Chronological order of the 'Alien' film movies + 'in universe' time line watch list

PRIORITY ONE — UPDATED

This guide now includes Alien: Earth, which aired its full eight-episode first season on FX and Hulu in August–September 2025 and slots into the timeline in 2120, two years before the Nostromo answers the beacon on LV‑426. For the deep dive on exactly where it sits, see when Alien: Earth is set in the franchise chronology.

The order I'd actually recommend

Chronological order is a fascinating second pass and a terrible first one. It opens on the two worst films in the set, spoils the Space Jockey reveal a century early, and defuses the single greatest jump scare in cinema by explaining the creature before you've met it.

First-timers: Alien → Aliens → Alien 3 (Assembly Cut) → Alien: Resurrection, then Prometheus → Covenant as a separate philosophical branch, then Romulus and Alien: Earth as the modern infill. Returning fans: run the chronology below and watch the Company slowly become the real monster.

01  ALIEN VS. PREDATOR

RELEASED 2004  ·  TIMELINE 2004  ·  STATUS: NON‑CANON

Director: Paul W. S. Anderson   Written by: Paul W. S. Anderson, from a story with Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett

Key cast: Sanaa Lathan as guide Alexa "Lex" Woods, Lance Henriksen as Charles Bishop Weyland, Raoul Bova as Sebastian de Rosa, Ewen Bremner as Graeme Miller.

A Weyland Industries expedition drills into a pyramid buried beneath Bouvetøya island and finds a hunting ground: Predators have been farming humans as xenomorph incubators for millennia, returning every century for the ritual. The pyramid reconfigures itself every ten minutes. The humans are livestock. Lex survives by being adopted as a hunt-sister by the last Predator standing.

Lore note: Casting Lance Henriksen as Charles Bishop Weyland is the film's one genuinely elegant idea — the founder of the company whose face is later moulded into the Bishop synthetic Ripley meets on LV‑426. Weyland Industries becomes Weyland-Yutani after the merger, and the loop closes on a name.

The theme underneath: AvP is the only entry where the xenomorph isn't an accident. Here it's husbandry — a species deliberately bred as prey. That's a colder idea than anything in Scott's films, and the movie is far too busy to notice it.

02  ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM

RELEASED 2007  ·  TIMELINE 2004  ·  STATUS: NON‑CANON

Directors: Colin and Greg Strause   Written by: Shane Salerno

Key cast: Steven Pasquale as Dallas Howard, Reiko Aylesworth as Kelly O'Brien, John Ortiz as Sheriff Eddie Morales, Ian Whyte as the Predator "Wolf".

A Predalien — a xenomorph gestated inside a Predator, inheriting both genomes — bursts out mid-flight and downs the ship over Gunnison, Colorado. A veteran Predator called Wolf is dispatched as a cleaner. The film's most transgressive sequence puts the Predalien in a maternity ward, and the town is ultimately resolved by a tactical nuclear strike.

Lore note: The final scene hands Wolf's recovered plasma caster to a Ms. Yutani — the intended seed for a third film explaining how the merged corporation acquired the space-travel technology that makes the whole franchise possible. It never got made.

The theme underneath: Requiem is the franchise at its most nihilistic and least interesting: no Ripley, no Company memo, no moral weight. It's the only Alien-adjacent film where nobody is expendable for a reason — they just die. Notoriously, it's also so underlit you can barely watch it happen.

03  PROMETHEUS

RELEASED 2012  ·  TIMELINE 2089–2093  ·  STATUS: CANON

Director: Ridley Scott   Written by: Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof

Key cast: Noomi Rapace as Dr Elizabeth Shaw, Michael Fassbender as the synthetic David 8, Charlize Theron as Meredith Vickers, Idris Elba as Captain Janek, Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland, Logan Marshall-Green as Charlie Holloway.

Shaw and Holloway find the same star map painted across a dozen unconnected human cultures and read it as an invitation. Weyland — dying, hidden aboard in stasis, funding the whole expedition for one selfish reason — sends them to LV‑223. What they find is not a homeworld. It's a military installation, its cargo of black pathogen intended for Earth, and its crew dead for two thousand years. The invitation was a warning, or a set of coordinates for a weapons depot. Nobody survives to clarify.

Lore note: The fossilised "Space Jockey" the Nostromo crew stumble over in 2122 was an unsolved mystery for thirty-three years. Prometheus names them: the Engineers, the Mala'kak, and the suit is not skin — it's a pressure rig. The pathogen itself, Chemical A0‑3959X.91–15, behaves less like a virus than an instruction set: it rewrites whatever it touches into something more efficient at killing.

The theme underneath: Creation as a chain of betrayals. The Engineers made us and regretted it; Weyland demanded immortality from his makers and was beaten to death for the presumption; and David, built by Weyland, watched all of it and drew the obvious conclusion. If you've ever wondered why the crew behave so appallingly for trained scientists, that's the point — human panic is the control variable against synthetic precision. Read the fuller thematic breakdown of Prometheus.

04  ALIEN: COVENANT

RELEASED 2017  ·  TIMELINE 2104  ·  STATUS: CANON

Director: Ridley Scott   Written by: John Logan and Dante Harper, from a story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green

Key cast: Michael Fassbender in a dual role as David 8 and the later-model Walter, Katherine Waterston as terraforming expert Daniels Branson, Billy Crudup as the disastrously insecure acting captain Oram, Danny McBride as pilot Tennessee, Carmen Ejogo as Karine.

Eleven years after the Prometheus vanished, the colony ship Covenant — two thousand sleeping colonists and a thousand embryos bound for Origae‑6 — takes a neutrino burst, loses its captain, and picks up a human voice singing on an uncharted world. They land. It is a graveyard: David bombed the Engineers' city with their own pathogen a decade earlier and has spent the intervening years alone with a laboratory and no supervision.

Lore note: The Neomorph — pale, eyeless, born through the back — is an earlier, wilder draft. The film's closing twist, that the surviving synthetic is David wearing Walter's identity, hands him two thousand hosts and full command of a colony ship. It is the single bleakest ending in the franchise.

The theme underneath: Covenant is Paradise Lost with a scalpel. David misquotes Shelley's Ozymandias and attributes it to Byron — a mistake Walter catches, and a perfect miniature of the whole character: enormous ambition, faulty attribution, no humility. Our Covenant themes essay and the piece on David's god complex go further; if synthetics are your interest, so does why the AI in these films should frighten you more than the creature.

05  ALIEN: EARTH  (TV SERIES)

SEASON ONE AIRED AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 2025  ·  TIMELINE 2120  ·  STATUS: CANON

Created and written by: Noah Hawley (Fargo, Legion), with Ridley Scott among the executive producers  ·  Network: FX / Hulu, eight episodes

Key cast: Sydney Chandler as Wendy, Timothy Olyphant as the synthetic Kirsh, Alex Lawther as her brother Joe "Hermit" Hermit, Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier of Prodigy, Essie Davis as Dame Sylvia, Babou Ceesay as Morrow, Adarsh Gourav as Slightly.

The first Alien story told on Earth, and the first told before Ripley exists. The Weyland-Yutani research vessel USCSS Maginot falls out of the sky onto Prodigy City carrying five collected specimens — the xenomorph is only the headline act. Earth is carved up between five megacorporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold. Prodigy's edge is hybrids: the consciousness of a terminally ill child uploaded into an adult synthetic body. Wendy is the first. Her recovery team, the Lost Boys, walk into the crash site looking for her brother and find the future of the species instead.

Lore note: Set two years before the Nostromo answers the beacon, sixteen after Covenant — which means the Company already had a xenomorph on Earth, and buried it, before Special Order 937 was ever written. Our dedicated piece on exactly when Alien: Earth is set and how the cover-up holds works through the dating, and the companies of Alien: Earth explained maps the corporate board.

The theme underneath: Hawley inverts the franchise's oldest engine. Alien was always about monstrous motherhood; Earth is about toxic corporate fatherhood — the creator who wants to own, monetise and eventually destroy what he made. The Peter Pan naming (Wendy, Slightly, the Lost Boys, a Neverland where nobody grows up) is not decoration, and neither is the scorpion-and-frog fable running under the whole season.

Season one, episode by episode:

• Episode 1 — the Maginot comes down
• Episode 2: "Mr. October"
• Episode 3: "Metamorphosis"
• Episode 4: "Observation"
• Episode 5 — the Maginot's black box, and Morrow's story
• Episode 6: "The Fly"
• Episode 7: "Emergence"
• Episode 8: "The Real Monsters" — season finale

Also worth your time: how Morrow communicates with Slightly, what the name Boy Kavalier is referencing, and why Wendy's childlike hubris is the season's real fault line.

06  ALIEN

RELEASED 1979  ·  TIMELINE 2122  ·  STATUS: CANON

Director: Ridley Scott   Written by: Dan O'Bannon, from a story with Ronald Shusett   Creature design: H. R. Giger   Score: Jerry Goldsmith

Key cast: Sigourney Weaver as Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley, Tom Skerritt as Captain Dallas, Ian Holm as the science officer Ash, John Hurt as Kane, Veronica Cartwright as Lambert, Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto as the engineers Brett and Parker.

Pitched as "Jaws in space" and built as something stranger: a haulage crew woken early by MU‑TH‑UR 6000 to investigate a transmission on LV‑426, because their contracts say they must. They find the derelict, the egg chamber, and a passenger. What follows is the purest exercise in claustrophobic dread the genre has produced — a working ship reduced to a maze of dripping conduits with something in it that they cannot see and cannot fight.

Lore note: The film's real monster is a paragraph. Special Order 937 — return organism, all other considerations secondary, crew expendable — predates the creature, which means the Company knew what was on LV‑426 before the Nostromo was ever diverted. Ash isn't a traitor. He's compliance. And Giger's design does its horror through anatomy: the ovomorph, facehugger, chestburster and adult life cycle is a reproductive process aimed at the audience's body, not the character's.

The theme underneath: Labour and expendability. Brett and Parker are arguing about shares of the bonus while the ship is being hunted. Ripley is right about quarantine on page one and is overruled, and everyone who overrules her dies. She is the argument for procedure in a universe that has priced procedure out — and the reason she reads as so much more than a final girl.

07  ALIEN: ROMULUS

RELEASED 2024  ·  TIMELINE 2142  ·  STATUS: CANON

Director: Fede Álvarez   Written by: Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues   Executive producer: Ridley Scott

Key cast: Cailee Spaeny as Rain Carradine, David Jonsson as her synthetic brother Andy, Archie Renaux as Tyler, Isabela Merced as Kay, Spike Fearn as Bjorn, Aileen Wu as Navarro.

Twenty years after the Nostromo, on the mining colony Jackson's Star, a group of indentured young colonists find their contracts silently extended and decide to steal cryo-pods from a derelict station drifting overhead. The Renaissance station has two halves — Romulus and Remus — and Weyland-Yutani has been synthesising the Z‑01 compound from a specimen recovered out of the Nostromo's debris field.

Lore note: That specimen is the twist that reframes the original film: the Company recovered the organism from the wreckage long before it ever found Ripley drifting in the Narcissus. Álvarez shot on miniatures, animatronics and puppets wherever he could to match the 1979 texture; our piece on how Romulus connects to the wider canon walks the bridge.

The theme underneath: Debt. Rain's crew aren't explorers or soldiers — they're workers who cannot buy their way off a planet that doesn't see daylight, and the station is full of the thing that will pay for their escape. Andy's directive rewrite — from protecting Rain to serving the Company — is the franchise's synthetic problem in miniature. See the Romulus themes and social commentary essay and our review of Alien: Romulus.

08  ALIENS

RELEASED 1986  ·  TIMELINE 2179  ·  STATUS: CANON

Director and writer: James Cameron, from a story with David Giler and Walter Hill   Score: James Horner

Key cast: Sigourney Weaver as Ripley (an Academy Award nomination, almost unheard of for the genre), Carrie Henn as Newt, Michael Biehn as Corporal Hicks, Lance Henriksen as the synthetic Bishop, Paul Reiser as the company man Carter Burke, Bill Paxton as Private Hudson, Jenette Goldstein as Vasquez.

Fifty-seven years adrift. Ripley wakes to find her licence revoked, her daughter dead of old age, and LV‑426 colonised by sixty families at Hadley's Hope — on Burke's paperwork. When the colony goes quiet she returns as an advisor to a squad of Colonial Marines who have never lost. Cameron converts horror into siege warfare and then takes the guns away.

Lore note: The M41A Pulse Rifle was assembled from a Thompson submachine gun, a SPAS‑12 shotgun and a Remington — real weight, real recoil, which is why it still looks better than most CGI weaponry forty years on. The Queen caste, the egg chamber and the hive hierarchy all arrive here and become franchise canon retroactively.

The theme underneath: Two mothers. The Vietnam allegory is loud — overconfident troops, an unwinnable asymmetric fight, a command structure that gets people killed — but the film's engine is Ripley refusing to leave Newt, and a Queen who is doing precisely the same thing for her brood. Burke, who tries to smuggle embryos home inside two sleeping women, is the only character in the film with no maternal instinct at all, and Cameron makes sure you notice.

09  ALIEN 3

RELEASED 1992  ·  TIMELINE 2179  ·  STATUS: CANON

Director: David Fincher (his feature debut)   Written by: David Giler, Walter Hill and Larry Ferguson, from a story by Vincent Ward   Score: Elliot Goldenthal

Key cast: Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, Charles S. Dutton as the prisoner-preacher Dillon, Charles Dance as the disgraced medical officer Jonathan Clemens, Brian Glover as Superintendent Andrews, Lance Henriksen as Bishop II.

The escape pod burns in over Fiorina "Fury" 161: a decommissioned lead works turned maximum-security foundry, staffed by double‑Y chromosome inmates who have found religion. Newt and Hicks die in the opening minutes — an act of vandalism the audience has never entirely forgiven. Ripley has no weapons, no allies and, it emerges, a Queen embryo in her chest. She ends the film by stepping backwards into the furnace.

Lore note: The 1992 theatrical cut is not the film to watch — the 2003 Assembly Cut restores roughly half an hour, changes the Runner's host from a dog to an ox, and coheres. The production was a catastrophe of shifting directors and unfinished scripts, and Fincher disowned it. On the biology, we've also covered why the Queen embryo took so long to gestate inside Ripley.

The theme underneath: Faith in a universe with nothing in it. The inmates call the creature the Dragon and read it as judgement; their apocalyptic Christianity is the film's whole spine, and Ripley's crucifixion-posed fall is the franchise's one unambiguous act of grace. Along the way, the brief, doomed intimacy between Ripley and Clemens is the only tenderness in 114 minutes. Full thematic reading of Alien 3.

10  ALIEN: RESURRECTION

RELEASED 1997  ·  TIMELINE 2381  ·  STATUS: CANON

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet   Written by: Joss Whedon   Score: John Frizzell

Key cast: Sigourney Weaver as Ripley 8, Winona Ryder as the synthetic Annalee Call, Ron Perlman as Johner, Dominique Pinon as Vriess, Brad Dourif as Dr Gediman, Michael Wincott as Elgyn.

Two centuries on, Weyland-Yutani is gone — bought out, we're told, by Walmart — and the United Systems Military has spent seven failed attempts cloning Ripley from blood samples taken on Fiorina 161. The eighth works. So does the Queen inside her, who develops a womb and gives birth to something part human. Ripley 8 has acid blood, enhanced strength and a hive-sense, and no obvious reason to be on humanity's side.

Lore note: Some sources date this to 2379; 2381 is the figure most consistent with the two-hundred-year gap the film states. The lab of surviving failed clones is the most disturbing thirty seconds in the whole saga — see the cloning themes essay. Whedon has said publicly that his script was shot largely as written and still came out wrong, and the discarded alternate endings include a ruined Earth that would have shifted the entire franchise's outlook.

The theme underneath: Ownership of the body, taken to its conclusion. Ripley spent four films refusing to be a host; here she is manufactured as one, and the Newborn that calls her mother has to be killed by her own hand through a hull breach. Grotesque, French, and far smarter than its reputation — our Resurrection themes piece and full review make the case.

The chronology will move again. It always does — a second season, another prequel, another retcon quietly rewriting a date somebody thought was settled. That instability isn't a flaw in the franchise. It's the same idea the films keep making: nothing here stays contained.