Noah Hawley’s track record of bold, unconventional TV reinventions of famed cinematic properties is about to get even more robust, as Variety reports that the Fargo and Legion creator has just formally signed on to make an Alien TV show for FX. Franchise launcher Ridley Scott is also in talks to hop aboard as an executive producer on the series, which was announced today as part of Disney’s big ol’ investors call to tout its just-expanded slate of products across all its TV brands.
This isn’t Hawley’s first space-based project, mind you; he previously directed the space drama Lucy In The Sky, and was working for a time on one of the many Star Trek movie reboot ideas that have been floating around for the last half-decade or so. Now he’s set his sights on a universe where astronauts actually need to wear diapers as often as they can, because if we saw a Xenomorph come crawling out of an airshaft, we’d probably shit ourselves, too.
Details about the series are extremely sparse at present, but it’ll apparently take place largely on Earth. (Which suggests either the possibility of a massive containment breach, or that the film is in the continuity of Alien: Resurrection, which, in either case: Uh-oh.) The show promises to blend “both the timeless horror of the first Alien film with the non-stop action of the second,” which, yes, does sound like it would be very cool if it did in fact happen.
Hawley’s reportedly been sniffing around Scott’s sci-fi-horror playground for a few years now; per Variety, Fox turned down plans for a show very much like this one last year, before its merger with Disney finished going through. The Weyland-Yutani of digital entertainment/largely shuttered theme parks has had a very good track record of transforming its film brands into TV shows of late, though, so it’s not wholly surprising that they’d brush off Hawley’s pitch and see what it can do at FX.
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He’s gonna remake the Spaceballs scene but with Mazzy Star’s Fade into You.
The Weyland-Yutani of digital entertainment/largely shuttered theme parks has had a , though, so it’s not wholly surprising that they’d brush off Hawley’s pitch and see what it can do at FX.Funny you say that because Dinsey has owned the theme park rights to the Alien franchise well before they bought Fox because Michael Eisner really wanted a ride based off of Alien. He was talked out of doing it by Imagineers who rightfully pointed that basing an attraction off an R rated movie would a terrible idea. So the concept was reworked into ExtraTERRORestrial: Alien Encounter. It was later re-themed into Stich’s Great Escape which was also scrapped and, IIRC, the building the attraction was housed in has been left unused ever since.Eisner did end up getting the Alien franchise into the parks via The Great Movie Ride.
Apparently that alien version (in the old Mission to Mars building, using a general audience-in-the-round format that goes back to the original Disneyland’s Rocket to the Moon) was pretty good, but still too scary for many little ones (even if not directly based on an R movie), so it was replaced with Stitch, which was unbearable for anyone not a little kid, even adults who otherwise enjoyed tame all-ages Disney attractions like Peter Pan’s Flight.
Also I’m sure Jeffery Jones, who was in the video portion of Alien Encounter, didn’t help the ride’s longevity after he got outed as a pedophile.
No, I went and it was bad.Years later though a friend went and thought that there was actually a guy running around in a rubber suit so I guess maybe it worked for some?
ExtraTERRORestrial was the first ride we went on the first time the wife and I went to Disney. She won’t let me forget that and I don’t want to.
The Ted Danson season will be the best.
I look forward to Kirsten Dunst as a Xenomorph.
Look out! She’s lurking behind that stack of magazines!No, the other stack of magazines. The stack that’s next to all of those boxes. No, not the boxes marked “old clothes for mending,” the boxes marked “nicknacks and odds and ends.” Oh wait, there are two columns of boxes like that next to ceiling high piles of magazines….
wooo. Hawley does great television. Legion is one of the best Superhero shows in living memory. I probably should watch Lucy in the Sky too, I was put off in the first few scenes but I didn’t know then that he was the director.
Holy crap, I am pretty amped for this.Hawley should be creatively fresh when working on new property, very much like what he did with Fargo and Legion. If the reports are true about him wanting to make Alien TV show for a long time, can’t wait to see how he do with it.Yeah, I know that his Legion’s Season 2 and Fargo’s Season 4 give me pauses about him creatively falling short of potentials, the other seasons definitely demonstrate how great he can be at top of his game.
Was the third season of Legion better than the 2nd? I stopped watching after that. But I’ve always found Hawley’s writing to be very hit & miss.
It’s definitely better than 2nd season. The story hit the beat at more even pacing and there’s some great character and plot developments going on. The 4th episode of 3rd season is one of series’ absolute best. You’ll have to watch what I mean as I won’t spoil anything there.The finale though… that was bit of hit and miss? The story do get resolved with a nice bow, which pretty much fit with its whole premise, so I guess I can’t exactly complain. The journey getting there? Worth it because its means watching Season 1 and 3 to start and end the story again and again will always be a blast.
Honestly, I take stuff like Legion S2 and Fargo S4 as part of the reason I’m excited. Even if Hawley’s stuff isn’t always of the exact same quality, he swings for the fences as hard as he can, and its always interesting to watch
Points.The tornado and outlaws and nurse as angel of death are some great stuffs in Fargo’s Season 4, which are still better than what other shows tried to capture. Hawley just seems to have a right knack for dark comedy that Coen Brothers perfected with their movies.Legion’s Season 2… well, first 4 episodes are really good, I’ll give Hawley that. And the deconstruction of delusions are also good, which partially helps to sell why David turned on his team at the end. The season came off the rail the more it spend time and time and time finding Shadow King’s body, though. That should have been resolved midway during the season and spend the rest of it developing his power and scheme against the team.At least 3rd Season redeemed Legion in more ways than bad, which I am perfectly happy with.
Sign me the fuck up!
I think I’d rather an Alien series from Legion’s Noah Hawley, but one by Fargo’s Noah Hawley might be good, too.(Before anyone doesn’t get it, yes, I know.)
Both of those guys are pretty busy and might be unavailable. If so, perhaps the Noah Hawley who edited the Bones episode “Spaceman in a Crater” could do the job?
I’m likely the only person on the planet who would like some closure on whatever silly horseshit Ridley was up to with his prequel trilogy.
Wrong.
Can anyone think of any other series that started out so fantastic and ended so shit? I mean the first two are legendary. I’ve seen them all multiple times (except the latest one I only saw once) and will watch whatever horseshit they shovel me.
So excited. Alien is in my top three favorite movies of all time and Aliens isn’t far behind. One of my favorite memories ever involving movies was a few Christmases ago, where my sister (who I get along with well but has fully different interests when it comes to movies) decided out of the blue that she wanted to watch it. Because she’s not into sci-fi or horror or any of that, not only had she never seen it, she knew literally nothing about it. She didn’t know chestbursters were a thing (even at a Spaceballs level), let alone that the scene with that reveal was going to happen. She whispered “Oh holy shit, fuck…” when she learned in real time that their blood is acidic. She had an idea that Ripley was the main character just because Sigourney Weaver is the most recognizable person on the cast to her, but besides that I got to experience watching the movie with an entirely fresh set of eyes that even I didn’t have thanks to general pop culture osmosis.It was a Christmas miracle.
I had a really similar experience with my partner. It’s always amazing when you can take something like that scene, which has become so ingrained in popular culture, and watch someone experience it for the first time.
“both the timeless horror of the first Alien film with the non-stop action of the second,”
Hard pass.
“They mostly come on Sunday nights… mostly… except when on hiatus during the Summer…”
I really like Noah Hawley, Legion was superb, the first two seasons of Fargo were excellent, and I enjoyed his novels Before The Fall and A Good Father a great deal. But that all said, I’m currently reading The Punch and absolutely hating it, the omniscient narrator is a smug, condescending, patronising idiot who makes statements that are supposed to amaze but would seem obvious to a ten year old, and there’s not a single bit of symbolism that he doesn’t explain in depth to the point that I’ve been tempted to stop reading many a time. The only thing that’s kept me going is my love for his previous work, and the presumption that at some point it’d get good, but I’ve got 30 pages to go until the end and it really doesn’t look like it will.
So yeah, if you’re a fan of Hawley’s like I am (was?) I’d avoid it like some kind of airborne plague that nobody likes.