TV
Noah Hawley Explains Why His “Alien” TV Series Won’t Be Using Anything from ‘Prometheus’
The Alien franchise will return with its first ever television series in 2025, and it’s set to be the first story in the franchise that takes place on Earth, roughly 70 years in the future.
Creator Noah Hawley‘s take on the Alien franchise has been described as both an “extension and reinvention” of the films, but don’t expect Ridley Scott’s prequel movies to factor into the series. Scott, who’s on board the FX series as producer, dug into the origins of the Xenomorphs in both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, but Hawley reveals in a new chat with KCRW’s The Business that he’s not interested in playing with any of those story threads.
Furthermore, he’s only interested in exploring the tech of the original two movies.
“Ridley and I have talked about this — and many, many elements of the show,” Hawley explains. “For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’ — as it was described in the first film — is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space. The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that’s just inherently less useful to me. And in terms of the mythology, what’s scary about this monster, is that when you look at those first two movies, you have this retro-futuristic technology. You have giant computer monitors, these weird keyboards … You have to make a choice. Am I doing that?”
Hawley continues, “In the prequels, Ridley made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien, which is supposed to take place in those movies’ future. There’s something about that that doesn’t really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films, and so that’s the choice I’ve made — there’s no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me.”
FX originally teased, “Expect a scary thrill ride set not too far in the future here on Earth.”
Sydney Chandler (Don’t Worry Darling), Babou Ceesay (“Guerrilla”), Jonathan Ajayi (“Wonder Woman 1984”), Erana James (“Uproar”), Lily Newmark (“Sex Education”), Diêm Camille (“Washington Black”), Adrian Edmondson (“War & Peace”), Timothy Olyphant (“Fargo”), David Rysdahl (“Fargo”), Essie Davis (The Babadook), Alex Lawther (The End of the F*cking World), Samuel Blenkin (“Black Mirror”), Adarsh Gourav (The White Tiger), and Moe Bar-El (The Peripheral) star in the upcoming sci-fi/horror series.
Sydney Chandler is playing a character named Wendy in the series, said to be “a hybrid, a meta-human who has the brain and consciousness of a child but the body of an adult.”
Published in 2019, Stephen King‘s novel The Institute is getting a TV series adaptation from MGM+, with Deadline reporting today that the project has been given a series order.
Ben Barnes (Shadow and Bone) and Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds) will star.
The Institute comes from director/executive producer Jack Bender (Lost, Mr. Mercedes), writer/executive producer Benjamin Cavell (Justified, The Stand) and MGM+ Studios.
In the eight-episode series, “When 12-year-old genius Luke Ellis is kidnapped, he awakens at The Institute, a facility full of children who all got there the same way he did, and who are all possessed of unusual abilities. In a nearby town, haunted former police officer Tim Jamieson (Barnes) has come looking to start a new life, but the peace and quiet won’t last, as his story and Luke’s are destined to collide.” The website notes that Parker will play “Ms. Sigsby, the charming but iron-willed director of the Institute and a true believer in its awful mission.”
“I’m delighted and excited at the prospect of The Institute, with its high-intensity suspense, being filmed as a series,” King said. “The combination of Jack Bender and Ben Cavell guarantees that the results will be terrific.”
“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work again with Stephen King. And The Institute, based on his critically acclaimed novel, is an exciting addition to the MGM+ original series slate,” said Michael Wright, head of MGM+. “There is no creative team I would trust more to bring the book to life than Jack and Ben, whose creative vision and love of Mr. King’s voice, will bring this thought-provoking and gut-wrenching story to life, in the engaging, cinematic, and thrilling style MGM+ viewers expect.”
Here’s the novel’s full synopsis, via Amazon:
As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.
In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.
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