Alien: 40th Anniversary Short Films


The xenomorph is now 40 years old — or at least it would be if Sigourney Weaver hadn’t blasted it out of the airlock. Alien is celebrating its 40th anniversary all the same, marking the occasion with a suite of short films that will start screening at fan conventions in May.

It’s clear that Ridley Scott doesn’t really trust anyone to take the reigns of the Alien series away from him anymore, and Ridley Scott himself can’t really be trusted to make new Alien movies anymore after Prometheus and Covenant failed to take over the world like a murderous plague of extraterrestrial monsters, so 20th Century Fox has decided to celebrate the Alien series’ 40th anniversary by cutting out theatrical movies entirely.

As explained by The Hollywood Reporter, the studio worked with a platform called Tongal that connects “brands, studios, and networks with online filmmakers to crowdsource new content” in order to find filmmakers who wanted to create a series of short films that will tell stories within the Alien universe without having to muck up the main timeline further.

Out of 550 submissions, six were chosen to become real shorts, and a new one will premiere every week on IGN starting on March 29 (they’ll eventually be shared on the Alien Universe website along with new behind-the-scenes content starting in May). Here’s a teaser for the series.

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