FX/Hulu Unveils Haunting Last Trailer for Alien: Earth

FX and Hulu’s Alien: Earth will be one of the biggest things to hit streaming in a while, if it’s as good as these trailers. So far, though, the prequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) has been mysterious. In early January, a surprise short teaser was unveiled during the NFL’s AFC Championship game. Then last month, the first full trailer was released. Now, the streaming giants have one last trailer—and a bit more of a synopsis—to give fans just one more taste of their new series. This time around, the footage seems both meditative (almost existential, even) and standard sci-fi horror: floating, drifting alien craft in deep space, corpses in low-light hallways, blood-covered humans running for their lives, and then, in the distance: one of the film’s most iconic figures—a xenomorph silhouetted in the shadows.

Alien: Earth from Showrunner Noah Hawley, will premiere on August 12, 2025, and be less action-y, more tone and mythos-heavy, but also more in line with the first Alien than any of the prequel films that followed, like Prometheus (2012) or Alien: Covenant.

It’s a chilly, thoughtful trailer, in the Alien tradition, an eight-episode series set in 2120, and so, two years before the events of Alien, shortly, where all of Earth has fallen to corporatocracy and five giant mega-corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. It’s the Corporate Era, an era defined by a convergence of artificial and biological intelligence. Cyborgs (humans with prostheses or implants) populate the workforce and are joined by synthetics, humanoid robots made of metal and wire, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). But this symbiotic balance is upset when the child prodigy, Founder and CEO of the mega-corporation Prodigy, first pioneers the advancement: hybrids.

These new humanoids are like the synthetics—robot bodies—but with a genuine human brain inside. The first is a prototype: “Wendy,” who, according to Hawley, is “basically a child’s brain in an adult’s body.” She’s in the middle of Wendy’s consciousness, “the body of an adult and the consciousness of a child,” it says. Sydney Chandler is a very special little girl.

A Life-Changing Opportunity

Just as Wendy is activated and her talent assessed, a Weyland-Yutani spaceship crashes into Prodigy City. It’s at this juncture that Wendy, along with the other hybrids, is exposed to foreign, unknown, alien organisms. Not just any alien organisms, but the scariest kind: deadly, never-before-seen species that will return in style, all too familiar to Alien fans.

FX and Hulu shared a teaser image from the Alien: Earth trailer in early January. It was just one shot of a singular, otherworldly eye. Then, during the AFC Championship game on January 20, they premiered a short teaser trailer, this one unseen to the naked eye. Or, well, not in a conventional sense: The two-minute clip was entirely shot from a xenomorph’s perspective.

Suddenly, the creature is running down the hallway of some spaceship, possibly the same one seen in the trailer’s other footage, and the camera—xenomorph’s eyes, in other words—pulls away to reveal the craft hurdling towards Earth as the ship explodes on impact. One small step for man, one giant leap for monsterkind.

The Sneak Peek

The first full trailer opened with the creation of Wendy in 2120 on the Neverland Research Island. But when an alien spaceship crash-landed in the near vicinity, Wendy opted to see its cain personrson. But instead of science and discovery, Wendy found death and horror.

Hidden in the wreckage were five alien life forms, deadly, previously unknown species that, thanks to Alien traditions of human hubris, were brought back to the lab for study. It’s an ominous, ominous setup.

Meet the Cast

Wendy is Sydney Chandler, with Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, Wendy’s synthetic trainer and caretaker; Alex Lawther as CJ, the soldier; Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier, CEO of Lynch Corporation; Essie Davis as Dame Silvia; Adarsh Gourav as Slightly; Kit Young as Tootles; David Rysdahl as Arthur; Babou Ceesay as Morrow; Jonathan Ajayi as Smee; Erana James as Curly; Lily Newmark as Nibs; Diem Camille as Siberian; and Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins.