Alien: Earth Trailer Hints at Terrifying Alien Encounters in 2120

FX and Hulu’s Alien: Earth have an air of mystery as the long-anticipated prequel series to Ridley Scott’s Alien approaches. Set to premiere on August 12, 2025, the forthcoming streaming series recently released its third trailer (along with a slightly expanded synopsis) for the show that promises to be as haunting as it is cerebral. The nearly two-minute trailer once again features a mix of more meditative, almost existential, scenes interspersed with jarring flashes of sci-fi horror: From ghostly alien ships gliding in a starfield, bodies strewn about in a shadowy hallway, to blood-soaked humans clawing and scrambling to survive—and, looming in the shadows, a distant familiar figure, silhouetted: a xenomorph.

Helmed by showrunner Noah Hawley (FX’s Fargo and Legion), who has said his approach to the tone and mythology of the series hews closer to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) rather than later prequel films like Prometheus (2012) or Alien: Covenant, the eight-episode first season of Alien: Earth is set in 2120, two years before the events of the first film in a near-future world where humanity is ruled by powerful corporate powers whose voracious appetite for profit and avarice put them on a collision course with their most valuable commodity yet: Life. Immortality, even.

War of the Worlds: Earth Is Ours, or, Humanity’s Corporate Masters Forge the Future

Alien: Earth’s 2120 is a very different Earth from the one we live in. But according to the official synopsis, while governments still exist in the series’ timeline, the planet is dominated by five mega-corporations that have monopolized on technology and trade: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. The year 2120 falls in the Corporate Era, where cyborgs and synthetics are fighting for supremacy. Cyborgs are biological humans with artificial components or augmentations, while synthetics are humanoid robots with bodies built from advanced robotics and powered by AI. Enter humanity’s ne plus ultra: hybrids.

Led by a young, prodigious Founder and CEO, the Prodigy Corporation—a mega-fortune in biotechnology and robotics—invents the next logical step of synthetics, known as “humanoid robots with human consciousness.” The prototype is a young girl named “Wendy,” described as “sympathetic” and “curious.” Wendy is “physically the body of an adult with the consciousness of a child.” She is also about to become the future of the never-ending battle for immortality.

Played by Sydney Chandler, the humanoid Wendy finds herself in the crosshairs of humanity’s fate when a Weyland-Yutani spaceship crashes into the sky over the Prodigy City. In the wreckage, Wendy and several other hybrid humanoids come in contact with alien organisms, unknown and far more deadly species than humanity had ever encountered before. Shot completely from a xenomorph’s POV, the trailer once again places viewers in the Alien franchise’s most famous creature’s perspective. Our lens is a male xenomorph, and he is in a spaceship chasing the crew as they claw and scramble toward a thick metal hatch at the top of a hallway. The trailer then cuts back to Wendy’s face in extreme close-up, screaming or crying, as the spaceship hurtles to Earth on its catastrophic collision course.

In addition to Chandler, the Alien: Earth cast features Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, a synthetic mentor and trainer to Wendy; Alex Lawther as CJ, a soldier; Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier, an ambitious 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.

Alien: Earth in the Building

In January, FX and Hulu released a surprise trailer that debuted during the NFL’s AFC Championship game. The trailer, a teaser just under a minute long, was shot entirely from the perspective of an Alien’s xenomorph. Racing through a spaceship corridor, as the ship itself hurtles through space at full-thrust toward the homeworld Earth in a catastrophic collision course, the point-of-view shot gave no insight or context to the trailer.

In February, FX and Hulu dropped the first full trailer. Opening with footage of Wendy’s origin in the year 2120, on a Neverland Research Island off the coast of Prodigy City. When a spacecraft belonging to an alien species crash-lands nearby, Wendy offers to help retrieve its mysterious cargo. Tragically, Wendy only finds carnage. The alien spaceship’s interior contained five life forms, all unknown and deadly alien organisms that, of course, in true Alien tradition, were recovered by one of the labs for further study.

Human hubris collides with true apex-predator horror in Alien: Earth, a collision all too familiar to Alien franchise fans, from the first movie to the newest series. With this final trailer, FX and Hulu further stoke intrigue. As much of a prequel prequel series (before the events of Prometheus and the Covenant films) as Alien: Earth might be, Hawley’s deliberate, world-building, and sometimes slow, atmospheric approach to Alien’s television prequel offers more than simply franchise fan service.

Teased as a mixture of philosophical and ethical sci-fi intrigue and chilling horror, Hawley’s Alien: Earth suggests, with this third trailer, a blend of sci-fi action, classic horror, and new existential dread. It also has a deeper, more sprawling world populated by characters who seem to cross shades of morality and character than has previously been the case for the series.

Premiering in just two months on FX and Hulu on August 12, 2025, Alien: Earth has a chance to be a franchise re-entry for fans of the original Alien and its most thoughtful philosophical and ethical questions about science, biology, consciousness, and what it means to be alive.