While Ridley Scott's sequel to Alien: Covenant is apparently on indefinite hold, the timeline for the franchise is open-ended.
It's getting quite complicated in there, so we've put together a handy year-by-year (or millennium-by-millennium) guide to Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, Alien, Aliens, Alien³ and Alien Resurrection so you won't be too confused by the time the next sequel/prequel arrives.
And, for completists, we've also mentioned the Alien vs Predator movies (sorry about that). Here's the story so far for the Alien franchise.
4 billion - 2 million BC – An alien race, later dubbed "The Engineers", visit Earth and leave one of their own behind. His body breaks down after he drinks black goo, and his DNA enters the water, recombining to create life.
35,000 BC – Evidence of the Engineers in Scotland.
3590 BC – Sumerian evidence of Engineers' visit to Earth.
2470 BC – Egyptian evidence of Engineers' visit to Earth.
1540 BC – Babylonian evidence of Engineers' visit to Earth.
8th century BC – the Prometheus myth (about a Titan who brought man to life from clay and stole the secret of fire from the Gods) first appears in Greek mythology.
620 BC – Mayan evidence of Engineers' visit to Earth.
1st century AD – The Engineers prepare a "death ship", filled with jars of black goo, to send to Earth in order to destroy their wayward children, humanity. (The decapitated Engineer found by the Prometheus crew on LV-223 was carbon-dated to 2,000 years before, "give or take".)
1990 – Peter Weyland, the man who will create the Weyland Corp, is born.
2004 – Aliens and Predators do stuff. Together. If you've seen the AvP films, then you'll know it's best we move on.
2012 – Peter Weyland founds Weyland Corp, the company behind so many doomed space missions.
2023 – Weyland gives a TED Talk, see below.
Around 2030 – Weyland creates David, an android (played by Michael Fassbender in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant).
2080s – Dr Elizabeth Shaw and Dr Charlie Holloway discover evidence of "star maps" from Babylonian, Sumerian, Mayan, Egyptian and Mesopotamian eras.
2089 – Shaw discovers another star map, or "invitation", in a cave on the Isle of Skye, Scotland.
2091 – The USCSS Prometheus, a space exploration ship built by Weyland Corp, leaves Earth on its journey to LV-223.
2092 – Ellen Ripley is born on Earth. (January 7, to be precise.)
2093 – All but two of the USCSS Prometheus crew are killed after an encounter on LV-223 with an alien species and a revived Engineer. The ship is destroyed and Dr Shaw and a severely damaged David leave on an Engineer ship to find the Engineers' homeworld.
2094 – Shaw presumably rebuilds David, and according to David's testimony in Alien: Covenant, he and Shaw arrive at "Paradise", a planet home to millions of Engineers. He uses their ship's toxic black-goo payload to destroy the entire population.
2104 – Covenant, a colonisation ship carrying thousands of humans and embryos, takes a detour to an unnamed planet (Paradise) on its way to Origae-6. There the crew discover David and a new species, the neomorph.
After the incursion on the planet, where the majority of the crew are killed, David is revealed to have bio-engineered aliens as we know them. He brings their embryos on board alongside the human embryos. The ship continues its journey to Origae-6.
*Mystery era, which a Covenant sequel would presumably occupy*
2120 – Space vessel Nostromo leaves Earth.
2122 – After detecting a signal, Nostromo lands on planetoid LV-426. After being infected by an alien face-hugger, executive officer Kane (played by John Hurt in Alien) dies when an alien bursts through his chest. It picks off the crew one by one, leaving Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Jones, the ship's cat, alive.
2179 – After drifting in stasis for 57 years, Ripley is rescued but returns to LV-426 because contact with the new human colony there, Hadley's Hope, has been lost.
Arriving with a military squad, they find the sole human survivor, Newt, more face-huggers, a swarm of aliens and a pretty badass Queen. Ripley escapes with Newt, Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn) and android Bishop (Lance Henriksen), and heads back to Earth in the Sulaco.
There must be at least two face-huggers on board, though, and as they sleep one impregnates Ripley with a queen. A fire starts somehow and the humans' life pod ejects, landing near a penal colony on Fiorina 161. Only Ripley and one other facehugger survive. Ripley kills the resulting alien, then dies by suicide by jumping into a furnace.
2379 – The United Systems Military clone Ripley (and her bio-passenger) from medical samples saved from Fiorina 161. They surgically remove the alien queen in order to breed the species, which escape on board the Auriga, killing many. Auriga crashes into Earth's atmosphere and blows up. The Ripley clone, meanwhile, escapes aboard the Betty with the android Call.
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