In 2019, when the Walt Disney Company bought up and swallowed whole 20th Century Fox, there were plenty of reasons to be a bit freaked out. For one, there’s the whole monopolization element, which the government has not exactly been keen to tackle head-on, an issue that has only grown even worse in recent years with the now in-motion Paramount-Warner Bros. merger. But beyond that, there was also the question of the art itself; what would happen to the films in production or to the numerous storied cinematic franchises whose rights were held within the vaults at Fox?
Two of the franchises that seemed poised to suffer the most were Fox’s long-running science-fiction horror monster films of both Alien and Predator. After all, in 2019, the previous installment in each of these franchises (2017’s Alien: Covenant and 2018’s The Predator) had failed to hit at the box office quite like executives might’ve hoped (despite the fact that both rule, but now is not the time or the place for that conversation). Thus, many assumed Disney would simply put these franchises on ice and neglect them for years to come. But in the years since then, that assumption has been proven well and truly wrong, with each franchise getting multiple installments across multiple eras and mediums. Which begs the question: what exactly is Disney doing with the Alien and Predator franchises?
To be a bit more succinct, it’s not actually Disney doing anything, but rather the now-renamed 20th Century Studios, which operates under the company’s larger umbrella. And the folks at 20th Century Studios have taken multiple ambitious swings with these franchises and diversified them in some truly impressive ways in the seven years since the acquisition. The Alien series has gotten the theatrical release of Alien: Romulus, a season of prestige TV in the form of Alien: Earth (with a second currently in production), and the just-confirmed Alien: Covenant follow-up from franchise architect Ridley Scott. Between these three projects, each of them is set in a different time period, focuses on completely different characters, and explores vastly different elements of the franchise as a whole.
With Predator, the story is much the same. That franchise released Prey as a streaming-exclusive film but earned rave reviews and record-breaking viewership; Predator: Killer of Killers as an animated anthology film, and Predator: Badlands to theaters. Again, these are three extremely different projects with literal centuries between them in terms of the franchise’s larger timeline. Even more interestingly, each of these three projects has been helmed by the same director, Dan Trachtenberg.
Famously, the Alien and Predator films have crossed over before, in the form of two not-so-well-received Alien vs. Predator films in the mid-‘00s. In the new films under Disney, the modus operandi is clearly to keep the two franchises within a larger universe together (as Predator: Badlands featured iconic Alien elements such as Weyland-Yutani androids), but they’ve also remained remarkably steady-handed when it comes to intertwining the two. In a post-MCU age, it doesn’t take much to imagine a world in which someone rushed to make another Alien and Predator crossover, but that’s the exact opposite of the approach 20th Century Studios leadership has employed.
While they’ve been open about a crossover remaining a possibility, the focus has clearly been on fleshing out and grounding the franchises individually in specific, motivated, and unique ways. The thing that really pushes all of this over the line for me into flat-out admiration for them is the recent news about Scott’s Covenant sequel, which is akin to the studio cashing in the goodwill they’ve built up with hits like Romulus and Alien: Earth to circle back to Scott’s more divisive prequel trilogy and allow the original director a chance to close out his series on his own terms. Wherever these eclectic and varied franchises go from here, I will remain beyond excited to see what’s next for Alien and Predator under this leadership.
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