Alien: Romulus: Where Does The Upcoming Movie Take Place In The Franchise's Timeline? Find Out
The classic Alien series events occur 18 years before Alien: Romulus. Alien: Romulus takes place 20 years post-Alien, bridging the gap to Aliens.
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The Alien franchise has been one of the most popular franchises in science fiction movies since the 1970s and is still continuing up to the forthcoming Alien: Romulus, both next and current entry in the franchise. The movies and spinoffs of Alien are pretty confusingly chronological, even more so with the Prometheus movie, which many viewers didn't quite realize was connected with Alien. Alien: The Continuity for Romulus will no doubt further confuse an already muddled franchise yet may also be a new beginning in the series.
Both The Prometheus films marks the beginning of the franchise
Prometheus, released in 2012, is a film marking three decades since the original Alien appeared and hence is the first in the chronology of Alien before Alien: Romulus. This is a story of the crew aboard a spaceship who discover artifacts related to human origins yet, at the same time, trace them to the Engineers-a race of extraterrestrial aliens with humanoid bodies that posed a threat to humanity. The storyline of the film spans between 2089 and 2093.
It was set within the same world where the Alien movies took place-interconnectively speaking-with the Weyland Corporation. However, the movie ends with mutant offspring of Dr. Elizabeth Shaw impregnating an Engineer to result in some sort of ancestral version of the Xenomorphs in the main movies of Alien. The connection between the film and Alien is not instant.
Alien: Covenant is a prequel released 11 years from the events of the end of Prometheus in 2017. It followed up on what the perfected Xenomorphs were created by an android-like human, which was David in the previous movie. However, at the end of this movie, many unexplained questions like the crashed Engineer ship were still left. It is the most recent Alien movie, and since it has not been indicated whether there will be a sequel to bridge with later films, this remains the case.
Next comes the Classic Alien Series
The first Alien movie is set in the year 2122, 18 years after Alien: Covenant and a little before Alien: Romulus. A crew of space explorers in Nostromo, led by series protagonist Ellen Ripley, encounter the Xenomorphs when one infests another and they start getting killed one by one. Weyland-Yutani, following its merger since Prometheus, wants a specimen Xenomorph for nefarious purposes of their own. In between, Engineers touch down on LV-426 and leave several Xenomorph eggs.
The alien sequel of the events takes place in 2179 with the movie Aliens. Ellen Ripley had been in cryogenic sleep, which a legion of Xenomorphs woke her up from, and she had to fight them with a crew. Alien 3 follows next in the series, also in 2179, where Ripley sacrifices herself to eradicate the species.
The fourth film is Alien: Resurrection, set 202 years later in 2381, following a clone of Ellen Ripley. Using the blood of the real Ripley, scientists create clones of both Ripley and the Xenomorphs. This new queen Xenomorph, carrying the mutated genetics, gives birth to a human-looking hybrid. Cloned Ripley and the crew of the Auriga battle the offspring while making their way to Earth. This is the latest in the Alien series, with no change in timeline, even with the new movie Alien: Romulus.
The timeline of Alien: Romulus
Alien: Romulus is the seventh primary Alien film in the series, which takes place between the events of Alien and Aliens, 20 years from the first movie. The film reportedly is a standalone piece and not a sequel to the Prometheus two-parter. A crew of space colonists investigates a lost spaceship where they find a deadly Xenomorph. The film is made completely with practical effects and no CGI at all; that really makes the Xenomorph even scarier than ever-another "old-school" feel of it.
It's narratively independent, meaning it won't be directly connected to the first Alien film or Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, either. The movie will need to succeed at the box office, since Alien: Covenant underperformed. The film, Alien: Romulus, shares a title linked to a mythological name, much like Prometheus. The success of it will perhaps allow for direct sequels tied in more concretely with the events of Aliens. Also, a second prequel comic for Alien: Romulus will be published later in 2024.
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