The Alien franchise is still going strong over 40 years after Ridley Scott’s classic original, and the series has endured its fair share of ups and downs in the interim.
Scott’s opening salvo was followed up by James Cameron’s Aliens, which turned the haunted house in space premise on its head and resulted in one of the greatest action movies ever made. The third installment, meanwhile, was plagued by behind the scenes issues and went on to shape the entire career of first-time feature director David Fincher, and Resurrection was a disappointing conclusion to the Ripley saga.
Then we’ve got Alien vs. Predator and sequel Requiem, which were largely dismissed by critics, while Prometheus was a decent-sized box office hit that split opinion down the middle, before Covenant returned to the roots of Alien but wound up underperforming. A Hulu show is now in the works with Scott poised to team up with Legion and Fargo creator Noah Hawley, and the second, third and fourth films are set to get a 4K remaster.
1979’s Alien is already available in Ultra HD, so it was only a matter of time before the rest of the franchise followed suit. However, the news comes with the caveat that the remastered versions will debut exclusively on Disney Plus’ STAR expansion, which has made vast swathes of the 20th Century Fox library available to subscribers outside of the United States, and only launched yesterday.
However, it would be safe to assume that they’ll also be added to Hulu eventually, while a home video Blu-Ray release is tentatively penciled in for some point next year. Completionists will be keen to get their hands on the entire 4K Alien box set as soon as it becomes available, but streaming will have to do for the time being.
