Romulus' place in the Alien timeline, explained

Key Takeaways

Alien: Romulus takes place approximately in 2142.
Romulus returns to the franchise’s focus on working-class characters manipulated by higher powers.
The film aims to blend the atmospheric horror of Alien with the thriller elements of Aliens.

Some things, like androids, aliens, or getting crushed by capitalism, are timeless. Or at least that seems like part of the motivation behind releasing Alien: Romulus, the first new film in the Alien franchise in six years — the last film was Alien: Covenant, released in 2017 and directed by franchise originator and longtime producer, Ridley Scott. The new film, directed by Fede Alvarez, follows a group of young space colonists who break into a derelict space station called the Romulus to strip it for parts. Naturally, they come into contact with some dangerous aliens in the process.

The Alien films cover everything from the seeding of human life on Earth, to decidedly human-made disasters taking place hundreds of thousands of years later, but broadly, the story has been told across six films, taking place during the 21st and 24th centuries. The first four films released follow a human engineer named Ellen Ripley (and technically, her clone), as played by Sigourney Weaver, and the most recent two entries follow David (Michael Fassbender), an antagonistic android created by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation who employed Ripley and her crew mates in the original films.

The main connective tissue between Romulus in the rest of the franchise appears to be the Xenomorph.

Ripley isn’t present in Alien: Romulus as far as trailers have shown, and neither is David. Really, the main connective tissue between Romulus in the rest of the franchise appears to be the Xenomorph. So, when does the film take place, and how does it fit into the larger thematic arcs of the whole Alien franchise? We’ve got an answer and some educated guesses.

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When does Alien: Romulus take place?

Timeless themes, but some specific years in the Alien universe

According to a Variety interview with director Fede Alvarez, Alien: Romulus takes place 20 years after the first film in the series. That puts Alien: Romulus between Alien, which takes place in 2122, and Aliens, which takes place 57 years after the first film. If you’re looking for a specific date, that means Alien: Romulus should take place somewhere around 2142.

Romulus appears to be returning to the Alien franchise’s focus on working-class characters being manipulated or harmed by the machinations of powers that are indifferent to them.

Even if we didn’t have the exact date, it just makes sense that the film would take place earlier in the series’ chronology. Based on the trailer, it’s clearly trying to divorce itself from the sleek, futuristic aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s most recent Alien films and bring audiences back to the grimy, rundown look of the originals.

And perhaps more importantly, Romulus appears to be returning to the Alien franchise’s focus on working-class characters being manipulated or harmed by the machinations of powers that are indifferent to them. I have to imagine the young colonists in the film weren’t supposed to find hundreds of baby aliens on that space station, and yet they were there because some corporation that didn’t care left them there.

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The Alien franchise timeline so far

Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017)

The crew of the Prometheus inside of an alien ship.

20th Century Studios

Prometheus follows a group of scientists in 2098, led by an archaeologist named Elizabeth Shaw, and funded by Peter Weyland, the CEO of the Weyland Corporation, looking for a race of aliens that might be the source of intelligent life formed on Earth. This search leads them to planet LV-233, a desolate planet home to an alien ship full of black goo-filled capsules and the corpse of an Engineer — the alien precursor Shaw was looking for.

Things go wrong when one of the members of the crew is exposed to goo and an alien “xenomorph” is born. Things really go off the deep end when it’s revealed that David, the Weyland Corporation android traveling with Prometheus, has ulterior motives. Prometheus makes the traditional “Alien” experience less about being exploited and more about the fraught relationship between creation and creator.

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Alien: Covenant continues the story 11 years later in 2104, following a crew on the colony ship Covenant, drawn down to the surface of a mysterious planet in pursuit of a crashed alien ship. After dangerous exposure to a pale “neomorph” alien, the crew comes into contact with David, who survived the events of Prometheus along with Shaw, and shows the Covenant crew what happened to this now abandoned planet.

As it turns out, there’s more than one alien on the loose, and David wasn’t entirely forthcoming about how the planet became abandoned. Plus, the neomorph looks different from the xenomorph for a reason — it was made on purpose. Alien: Covenant gives Prometheus’ obsession with creation an almost biblical spin. The Engineers played god by creating humans and xenomorphs, humans play god by creating androids, and David decides he doesn’t want to play the same game anymore.

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Alien (1979)

A facehugger latched on to a member of the Nostromo crew.

20th Century Studios

Alien follows the crew of the Nostromo, a group of long-haul space truckers who follow a distress signal to a desolate moon to explore, you guessed it, a crashed alien ship. Inside, they find the giant corpse of an alien navigator (an Engineer from Prometheus), and eggs.

An egg hatches into a crab-like “facehugger” which attaches to one of the Nostromo’s officers, effectively killing him when the alien it implanted him with bursts out of his chest. Crew members start dropping like flies as the baby alien grows into an adult xenomorph, until only Ellen Ripley and the ship’s android, Ash, are left.

When it turns out Ash has been directed to bring the xenomorph back to “the company” (Weyland-Yutani) at all costs, Ripley takes matters into her own hands. Besides establishing iconic visuals that all films in the franchise reference, Alien also set the thematic groundwork for the series. The anxiety over creation (specifically, childbirth) and the awareness that employers don’t really care about their employees, just the assets and “value” they can acquire for them.

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Alien: Romulus (2024)

One of the colonists exploring the Romulus space station with a gun.

20th Century Studios

Alien: Romulus follows a group of young space colonists in 2142 who decide to explore a derelict space station called Romulus and seemingly loot it. Those plans get interrupted when they come into contact with facehuggers and, eventually, a xenomorph threat of their own. We’ll have to wait until Romulus comes out on August 16, 2024, to learn all the details of the film, but the trailers suggest it’s going to try and split the difference between the more atmospheric horror of Alien and the thriller elements of Aliens, by returning the focus to people at the bottom rungs of society.

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Aliens (1986) / Alien 3 (1992)

Ripley facing off against the alien queen.

20th Century Studios

After putting herself in stasis at the end of Alien, James Cameron’s Aliens picks up Ripley’s story 57 years later in 2179, rescued by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Ripley tries to warn them about the alien eggs the crew of the Nostromo discovered, only to learn the moon from Alien (LV-426) has been converted into a terraforming colony. Ripley accompanies a Weyland-Yutani representative and a group of space marines to the colony to find out why they lost contact with the corporation and runs into xenomorphs, their giant queen, and a child named Newt who somehow survived the fall of the colony.

Discoveries ensue that suggest the colony was studying the aliens as much as they were terraforming and that Weyland-Yutani corpo is willing to get everyone killed if he can get some xenomorphs off the moon and into a lab naturally follow. Aliens, in becoming more action-packed, also lays the capitalistic critique of the Alien franchise even more plain. Xenomorphs might be life-threatening to the average working joe, but they’re an opportunity for a megacorporation.

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Alien 3 picks up immediately after the events of Aliens with Ripley, Newt, and the surviving space marine crash landing in a penal colony. Ripley is the sole survivor of the crash, and when a facehugger that is stowed away on her ship implants an alien in a dog in the prison, she’s forced to deal with yet another xenomorph outbreak.

The wrinkle? Ripley was implanted with an embryo from the alien queen in the previous film, and now has to worry about her own ticking clock along with the survival of the penal colony’s inmates. Besides its difficult production, Alien 3 is best known for the bleak and brutal note it ends Ripley’s story on — maybe death by the aliens or the company pursuing them is inescapable.

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Alien Resurrection (1997)

The Ripley clone examining a dead xenomorph experiment.

20th Century Studios

Until Alien Resurrection, of course, set 200 years after Aliens 3 in 2379, restarts Ripley’s story. Only it’s not the Ripley of the first film, it’s a clone called Ripley 8, who just so happens to have some xenomorph DNA. Ripley 8’s loyalties are called into question when lab-grown xenomorphs escape on the military science ship where she was made, and she’s forced to team up with a group of mercenaries to survive and keep xenomorphs from making it to Earth.