Hawley broke down the challenge of bringing what made “Alien” great into the television arena, and it required some adjusting. He explained:
“Look, a two-hour movie, you can set it up and then it’s just about, ‘Are they going to survive?’ But if you’re making a series, ‘Are they going to survive?’, you can’t sustain it. Even if you have 60% of the best action-horror on television, you still have 40% of ‘What are we talking about?'”
Hawley recalled some early conversations during development of the series that helped shape what the “Alien” show would become. The filmmaker said, “I had some conversations early on with Peter Rice, who used to run all of television at Fox and then the first couple of years at Disney, where it was like, ‘The thing with Alien is, it’s always trapped in a spaceship, trapped in a prison. What if it wasn’t that?'”
Instead, Hawley will be bringing the xenomorphs to Earth, and it will explore that moment in Earth’s history. As he explained, “What is this moment on Earth, technology-wise? And where are we? And the question science-fiction always tends to ask is, does humanity deserve to survive? So that seems like a really interesting question to continue to explore.”
That will include a bit of exploration into AI, which has also always been prominent in “Alien” movies, thanks to the presence of extremely advanced androids like Ash (Ian Holm), who actually gave the original “Alien” one of its most surprising twists. Hawley confirmed that reveal was a key moment that inspired his “Alien” series.
But since this is an “Alien” series, what about the xenomorphs themselves? What can we expect from their presence? Apparently, that will be refreshed a bit too.