If you are someone who enjoys watching gore and horror, the Alien franchise is something that is quite literally handcrafted for you. This franchise has been running for quite some time and has given us eight movies in total, with another one recently released. Some of these movies were phenomenal, but some were not so good. Now that Alien Romulus is out, it’s time to start watching Alien movies to get familiar with the franchise. Here’s how to watch the Alien movies in order, both by release date and chronological order.
Alien Movies in Release Date Order
- Alien (1979)
- Aliens (1986)
- Alien 3 (1992)
- Alien: Resurrection (1997)
- Alien vs. Predator (2004)
- Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
- Prometheus (2012)
- Alien: Covenant (2017)
- Alien Romulus (2024)
- Alien: Earth (2025)
Alien Movies in Chronological Order
1. Alien vs. Predator
- Release Date: 13 August 2004
- Cast: Sanaa Lathan, Tom Woodruff Jr., Ian Whyte, Lance Henriksen, Alec Gillis, Raoul Bova, Colin Salmon, Ewen Bremner, Tommy Flanagan, Agathe de La Boulaye
- IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 5.7/ 21%
- Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
Released in 2004, Alien vs. Predator is set in the same year and takes us to a crew led by Charles Bishop Weyland, who is trying to investigate a heat signature they found buried in the ice under Bouvetøya, an island off the coast of Antarctica. However, their expedition ends horribly when they unleash the evergoing battle between Xenomorphs and three Hunter Predators.
But this movie messes up the timeline and origin of the Xenomorphs set by the Aliens movies since a flashback also shows us that Aliens and the Predators have been at war with each other for a massive amount of time, basically, since before the dawn of human civilization.
2. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
- Release Date: 25 December 2007
- Cast: Reiko Aylesworth, Tom Woodruff Jr., Kristen Hager, Johnny Lewis, John Ortiz, Ian Whyte, Ariel Gade, Steven Pasquale, Sam Trammell, Liam James, Robert Joy, Françoise Yip
- IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 4.6/12%
- Director: Greg Strause, Colin Strause
Even though it was released in 2007, Alien Vs Predator: Requiem is set in the year 2004 and picks up right where the first Alien vs Predator movie left off. There are two versions of the movie, where the extended one is slightly better than the original cut.
This movie and the previous one are constantly trying to impose that both the Alien and The Predator franchises are part of a big cinematic universe and end up revealing that the space travel advancement seen in Yutani Corp in the Alein franchise was taken from Predator tech.
3. Prometheus
- Release Date: 8 June 2012
- Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, John Lebar, Ian Whyte
- IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 7/73%
- Director: Ridley Scott
Chronologically, this prequel movie, Prometheus, is the first one in/ the Alien-Alien franchise. Set in the year 2089, this movie shows us that archaeologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway found a distant star dubbed LV-223 that can support human life. They are sent to LV-223, financed by Weyland Corporation, where they arrive in the year 2093.
This movie does not contain a lot of Alien action sequences but tells us a lot about “Engineers,” the ones who created them. If we look at this movie, classic Xenomorphs are nowhere to be seen and are nonexistent which makes the Alien Vs Predator movies irrelevant.
4. Alien: Covenant
- Release Date: 11 May 2017
- Cast: Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Katherine Waterston, Danny McBride, Callie Hernandez, Tess Haubrich, James Franco, Guy Pearce, Billy Crudup, Amy Seimetz, Jussie Smollett, Bolaji Badejo
- IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 6.4/65%
- Director: Ridley Scott
The story of Alien Covenant takes a massive leap in time this movie is set in the year 2104 which is exactly 11 years after the expedition we saw in Prometheus go missing. The colonization ship named Covenant is going to a planet named Origae-6 but an unidentified transmission of a human voice makes the crew of the ship look for who sent it, which leads them to an Earth-like planet.
Even though this movie once again does not give us a lot of classic Alien-like action there is just enough for the fans of this franchise to be happy. The selling point of this movie was that it gave the Aliens a strong origin point which once again does not align with what we saw in the Alien Vs Predator movies.
5. Alien
- Release Date: 25 May 1979
- Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, Bolaji Badejo
- IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 8.5/93%
- Director: Ridley Scott
The events we see in the original Alien movie take place in the year 2122 which sets it 18 years after what we saw in Alien Covenant. This movie is where it all began and everything that happens in this movie is pretty standalone. This movie reinforces that back on Earth, Weyland Corporation has learned about the existence of Xenomorphs by either a surviving member of previous expeditions or transmissions since Weyland-Yutani was seeking out these creatures.
6. Aliens
- Release Date: 18 July 1986
- Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Michael Biehn, Jenette Goldstein, Paul Reiser, Colette Hiller, Al Matthews, Mark Rolston
- IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 8.4/94%
- Director: James Cameron
Set in the year 2179, Aliens takes us to Ellen Ripley, the sole survivor of Nostromo, who is rescued by her employers in deep space. However, what she tells them in her debriefing is taken with a grain of salt by them. LV-426 is now a massive terraforming colony, and eventually, some employees come across dormant Xenomorph eggs, which don’t stay dormant for too long.
7. Alien 3
- Release Date: 22 May 1992
- Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Lance Henriksen, David Giler, Pete Postlethwaite, Terry Rawlings, Ralph Brown, Brian Glover, Deobia Oparei, Danny Webb, Paul McGann, Christopher Fairbank, Charles S. Dutton, Holt McCallany, Carl Chase
- IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 6.4/ 44%
- Director: David Fincher
Alien 3 takes place not too long after the events of Aliens where we see Ripley, Newt, Hicks, and the damaged android Bishop go into cryostasis. Ripley crash lands on a barren planet and finds herself trapped on Fiorina “Fury” 161 while being hunted down by the Xenomorphs at the same time. This suggests that everything that has been happening in this threequel is rather fast-paced. This movie was the last one in the original Aliens franchise, and everything that followed after this was either a prequel or a sequel stemming out of everything we saw in these three movies.
8. Alien: Resurrection
- Release Date: 6 November 1997
- Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Dominique Pinon, Gary Dourdan, Kim Flowers, Brad Dourif, J. E. Freeman, Leland Orser, Michael Wincott, Dan Hedaya, Raymond Cruz, Tom Woodruff Jr.
- IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 6.2/ 55%
- Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Alien Ressurection by far takes the biggest time jump in the entire franchise. The movie is set in the year 2381, which is a massive time gap of 202 years after the death of Ripley and the last known Xenomorph. However, in this movie, she was resurrected using a blood sample of hers along with a Xenomorph Queen. This movie, by far, does not have any other connection with the previous movies except the cloning of Ripley and is a fresh look at the franchise after such a massive gap in time.
9. Alien: Romulus
- Release Date: August 16, 2024
- Cast: Cailee Spaeny, Robert Bobroczkyi, Isabela Merced, David Jonsson, Trevor Newlin, Aileen Wu, Spike Fearn, Archie Renaux, Daniel Betts
- IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 7.1/ 80%
- Director: Fede Álvarez
Alien: Romulus is the most recent addition to the franchise and features a pretty similar plot to the OG Alien movies. The movie gives us a female protagonist who seems to be a version of Ripley brought forward in a new-age Alien movie and her companions who board an abandoned space station in hopes of finding cryostasis equipment.
However, on the ship, the encounter facehuggers and Xenomorphs, turning it into a fight for survival for the group. Alien Romulus works on the basic formula that made the original Alien movie a success and even though it is not as good as the OG one, it still stands pretty solid on its ground.
10. Alien: Earth
- Release Date: Summer 2025
- Cast: Sydney Chandler, Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, David Rysdahl, Kit Young, Lily Newmark, Adarsh Gourav
- IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes: TBA
- Director: Noah Hawley
Alien: Earth is the upcoming addition to the Alien franchise. It is a TV show and not a movie. As of now, not many plot details for Alien: Earth are available to us. But looking at the teasers released so far, it seems that a ship containing a Xenomorph will crash into Earth. Then, the protagonists will be seen trying to contain the threat that could result in the extinction of the human race. Alien Earth is reportedly a prequel TV show in the franchise’s timeline and will present us the events that took place two years before the events of the original Alien movie released in 1979.
Shashank Shakya
