This year will see the 40th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s Alien, the first and arguably best entry in this enduring sci-fi franchise, and to mark the occasion, 20th Century Fox is releasing a 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray package that will be available in the UK from April 1st, 2019.
As it stands, Fox has yet to share many details about the features of this package, nor have they announced any plans for a North American equivalent. Nonetheless, we expect Alien to get the 4K treatment for the US soon enough, with the release date likely to fall somewhere close to the anniversary of the film’s release on May 25th, 1979.
In the years since Alien and its similarly beloved 1986 follow-up Aliens hit theaters, the franchise has yielded several more sequels and spinoff works, all of which have brought in responses that ranged from mixed to negative, but for the first time in a while, it’s looking genuinely uncertain whether the property still has another movie left in it.
Though there was hope a few years ago that District 9 director Neill Blomkamp might helm a timeline-altering reboot that disregarded all of the events that followed on from the franchise’s first two entries, the project was ultimately shelved. And while the recent announcement of a new Alien mobile game briefly had fans hoping that this was just the beginning of a revival for the series, FoxNext’s VP of external development clarified last week that the product was a mere one-off.
To make matters worse, a report published last August in The Wall Street Journal suggested that the Alien franchise’s new owners at Disney could be looking to “scale back production of costly movies that don’t fit its family-friendly, franchise-focused formula,” which would likely mean bad news for this typically gruesome property.
Nonetheless, if you feel like revisiting the franchise at its dread-inducing peak, news on a 4K Ultra HD Alien release for the United States could be just around the corner.
