New Alien: Earth Footage Reveals Corporate Conspiracies and Xenomorphs

FX and Hulu’s prequel series Alien: Earth is almost upon us. On August 12, 2025, streaming will begin for the eagerly awaited new chapter in one of sci-fi’s most successful horror franchises. To keep fans on their toes, FX and Hulu have dropped one last trailer — plus a more detailed synopsis — for the event series that promises to be as thoughtful as it is unsettling. In addition to meditative, almost existential establishing shots of mysterious alien craft adrift in space and dead bodies splayed out in dark corridors, the new clip also features humans covered in gore running for their lives and, in the distance, the unmistakable profile of one very large shadowed figure: a xenomorph.

Alien: Earth Showrunner Noah Hawley has emphasized that the new series’ tone and mythology would be more in line with Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) than with other prequels such as Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant. Set in the year 2120, two years before the first film, Alien: Earth is an eight-episode series that imagines a near-future in which faceless corporate entities battle to gain control of (and claim ownership over) humanity’s most valuable asset: life itself — and by extension, immortality.

Earth in the Year 2120, A.C.E. : The Rise of the Hybrids

In the Alien: Earth timeline, by the year 2120, the Earth is not ruled by governments but by five mega-corporations, known as Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. This is the Corporate Era (C.E.): a time when cyborgs (humans with machine parts) and synthetics (humanoid robots with artificial intelligence) have become common. The power dynamic shifts when a young, prodigious Founder and CEO of one of the corporations, Prodigy, creates a new and terrifying race: hybrids, humanoid robots with actual human minds and personalities inside.

Played by Sydney Chandler, Wendy is the first of these prototypes: a childlike human mind with the body of an adult. In the trailer, we see Wendy being “born” in a futuristic laboratory setting, and we also learn a little about her backstory. “They say I am the future,” Wendy is heard to say in the trailer. The quote is a tip of the hat to Earth’s standard-issue greeting in Alien. “Welcome to the future,” comes the reply from the film’s android Ash.

The calm is soon broken by an alien spaceship plummeting out of space and crashing into the nearby Prodigy City. In the ensuing chaos, Wendy and other hybrids escape the lab, come into contact with unknown alien organisms, and become infected with alien life forms that are deadlier than any humanity has ever known.

Chandler is joined by a large cast, including Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh (Wendy’s synthetic mentor and trainer), Alex Lawther as soldier CJ, Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier (the CEO), Essie Davis as Dame Silvia, Adarsh Gourav as Slightly, Kit Young as Tootles, David Rysdahl as Arthur, Babou Ceesay as Morrow, Jonathan Ajayi as Smee, Erana James as Curly, Lily Newmark as Nibs, Diem Camille as Siberian, and Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins.

FX and Hulu’s Teaser to Story Reveal Trailers

FX and Hulu have released several teasers and trailers for Alien: Earth. The first, a surprise short teaser, dropped during the NFL’s AFC Championship game in January. That one-minute clip is shot entirely from the xenomorph’s point of view as it races down a corridor toward the camera as the spacecraft carrying it plummets toward Earth. That close-up xenomorph POV shot with no context set the terrors for the series.

Last month, the first full trailer was released. It opens with the initial scenes from Wendy’s creation in the year 2120 on Neverland Research Island. Prodigy’s leading scientists, engineers, and specialists have just received a major surprise when an alien spaceship crashes on the nearby island. The testy Wendy volunteers to retrieve the mysterious contents of the downed ship. But rather than an opportunity to make scientific progress, the horror begins: instead of treasure or technology, Wendy discovers a field of carnage. The trailer flashes back to inside the spaceship’s decimated hull, where the crew found five alien life forms: dead but not inert — or lifeless. As in the Alien film franchise’s origin story, these unknown alien species are taken back to the laboratory to be cataloged and researched.

Human overconfidence has met an apex predator. As the final trailer makes clear, it’s not only a horror show, but it’s a horror show with the gears and grist to make the dread build. Hawley, who has said his main inspiration for Alien: Earth was the xenomorph POV scene from the original film, has put much of his focus on world-building and atmosphere, and as a result, the Alien: Earth cast seems ripe with morally complex, shaded characters. It’s an attempt to lean into the series as a claustrophobic, horrifying, and yet somehow strangely ethereal take on the future. The return to the film that started it all, with all the humor, horror, and high stakes humanity has come to expect from the sci-fi classic.