Alien timeline: where does Covenant fit in the Alien films?

Alien: Covenant (2017), starring Michael Fassbender and Katherine Waterston, came with questions about how exactly its story fits into the overall timeline of the Alien franchise. Here's the full, complicated chronology, including the Alien vs. Predator movies and the real reason they're no longer considered canon. It isn't only because people don't like them. The story is more interesting than that.

I'm a fan of the Alien movies. The first two are my favorite films, which I know is an unpopular opinion. Even as the franchise got weirder, and in some cases not so great, I've always had a soft spot for the science fiction elements in the backstory of all of these movies. Be aware that what follows covers major plot details from every Alien movie, plus a few minor things from Covenant.

Alien: Covenant is a sequel to Prometheus that isn't an exact sequel

When Ridley Scott announced Alien: Covenant, he said it wouldn't be an exact sequel to Prometheus. That film ended with Elizabeth Shaw and David leaving LV-223 for the Engineers' homeworld. Covenant instead follows a separate crew in the same universe, aboard a ship called the Covenant, as they try to establish a human colony on a new world.

It all takes place a decade or so after the events of Prometheus. So it's a non sequel sequel, but still a prequel to the original Alien. That's confusing, so the clearest way through it is to start at the beginning and work forward chronologically through the whole timeline.

Prometheus puts the start of the Alien timeline at 3.2 billion years BC

Prometheus established the earliest events at 3.2 billion years BC. Its prologue showed the Engineers leaving ancient Earth while one of them stayed behind, drinking a black liquid and dissolving into a waterfall. That sacrifice was considered the origin of all life on Earth.

The promotional site for Prometheus included its own timeline for the Weyland Corporation. It included the birth of Peter Weyland in 1990, and the company went on to become a juggernaut of technology. Weyland gives a legendary TED talk in 2023 that outlines his vision of building better worlds. Two years later, in 2025, Weyland creates David, the first generation android that serves as a model for all the others afterwards. That line covers David 8 in Prometheus and Walter in Covenant, and also later androids like Ash in Alien and Bishop in Aliens.

Decades pass. In 2089, Prometheus shows Shaw and Holloway discovering ancient cave paintings in Scotland that depict an Engineer pointing to a star map. Four years later, in 2093, they arrive at LV-223 on a mission funded by Weyland, which brings us to the main events of Prometheus.

The Engineers, the black goo and the Deacon in Prometheus

The key reveal in Prometheus involves the Engineers. Over the years they became unhappy with the monsters they created, the human race, so they planned to wipe us out with a bioweapon: black goo that infects us and turns us into even uglier monsters. When David awakens the surviving Engineer, he plans to head to Earth to begin that process. He's foiled when his ship is disabled, and he's killed and impregnated by the trilobite squid creature that Shaw had cut out of her womb earlier in the film.

That results in the Deacon. It looks like a xenomorph, but it's not, at least not yet. It's probably an early stage.

It seems like Ridley Scott's idea is that the xenomorphs are a combination of a few ingredients: the bioweaponry created by the Engineers, the Engineers themselves, and Shaw, whose human womb incubated the trilobite and who unleashed it on the Engineer. That sets up some clever cyclical irony, with both the Engineers and the human race as cocreators of the instrument of their own destruction.

Alien: Covenant takes place around 2103, on the Engineers' homeworld

Alien: Covenant takes place about 10 years after Prometheus, around 2103. The Covenant crew arrives on a lush, beautiful world, but it's also the homeworld of the Engineers, the place Shaw and David were headed at the end of Prometheus. The Michael Fassbender android on the Covenant isn't David 8. He's Walter.

Without saying too much, Covenant goes deeper into the history of this line of androids, and it shows how David, not Shaw, was the actual main character of Prometheus.

The events of the original Alien take place not too long after this, in 2122. There are some fun references in Covenant that imply how close in time the two movies are. The Covenant crew calls their ship's central computer Mother, just like the Nostromo crew does in Alien, suggesting they're the same technology.

More movies were planned for the gap before the original Alien

At the time Covenant came out, it sounded like we might still see another movie or movies set in the roughly 20 year gap between Covenant and Alien. Ridley Scott said four more Alien movies were in development. Some of those could also take place between Alien and Aliens while Ripley is in hypersleep, or even later in the timeline.

We knew then that one of those four was Alien: Awakening, and it was said the order would go Prometheus, Awakening, then Covenant. My theory is that Awakening would tell the story of the events that led from the Deacon on LV-223 to the full xenomorph form we see later.

The classic Alien movies run from 2122 to Alien Resurrection

The rest of the main Alien timeline is straightforward. These are the classic movies that started it all, and to me they're the best science fiction movies of all time. I'm including Star Wars in that, because Star Wars is fantasy, not science fiction, and there is a difference.

The original Alien is set in 2122, with the Nostromo responding to a distress call on LV-426. The crew finds the derelict, the ancient ship of the Engineer. The Engineer wasn't called that yet, because Ridley Scott hadn't written this backstory. For years he was called the space jockey. That leads to Kane getting infected by a facehugger, the infamous chestburster scene, and Ripley narrowly escaping with Jonesy.

James Cameron's Aliens takes place 57 years later, in 2179, when Ripley is awakened from hypersleep and sent back to LV-426 on a rescue mission with Colonial Marines. It quickly goes badly, until Ripley tells the alien queen to get away from her and fights her. If you can't tell, I'm a huge fan.

Alien 3 takes place right after that, with Ripley crash landing on the prison colony Fiorina 161, or Fury 161. She learns she has an alien queen embryo gestating inside her, and rather than let Weyland get its hands on the xenomorph, she kills herself and the baby by jumping into a fire. Alien Resurrection gets even crazier, jumping ahead 200 years to 2379, when the United Systems Military uses Ripley's blood collected on Fury to clone her. Ripley's DNA has fused with the xenomorph, so now she has super strength and acidic blood. They extract the alien queen from her and use it to breed even more xenomorphs, as well as a human xenomorph hybrid, on the ship Auriga, which in the end crashes into Earth, supposedly killing all the xenomorphs. That's as far into the future as the Alien timeline goes.

Why Ridley Scott doesn't count Alien vs. Predator as canon

That leaves out a big part of the franchise's cinematic history: the two Alien vs. Predator movies. People have stopped talking about them in timeline terms because they're no longer considered canon. When Ridley Scott returned to the franchise, he said only the movies with Ripley are canon, and that Prometheus and the new Alien movies would establish the canon xenomorph backstory leading up to the Nostromo mission.

So Scott is pretending Alien vs. Predator and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem didn't happen. Damon Lindelof, the co-writer of Prometheus, said that when he brought up Alien vs. Predator to Scott, Scott gave him a dirty look.

That's Ridley Scott's decision to make. He directed the first Alien film from the vision of screenwriters Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, and 20th Century Fox, the studio that owns the property, has given Scott the reins to decide what is and isn't part of the timeline. I'm okay with that.

The Alien vs. Predator backstory: Predators as gods of ancient Earth

Even though it's been overwritten by Prometheus, the Alien vs. Predator history is interesting. It was based loosely on the late 80s Aliens vs. Predator comic series, which goes more into the history of the Predators, a tribe of hunters who end up dealing with their own xenomorph infestation and team up with a human. For the first Alien vs. Predator film, writer Paul W.S. Anderson used pieces of that comic backstory along with research into Aztec mythology and Erich von Däniken's theories that extraterrestrials helped ancient cultures build pyramids.

The film has a history sequence that puts the earliest point of its timeline thousands of years BC. It shows the Predators on Earth working with ancient human cultures, teaching them how to build, and being worshipped as gods. The Predators return every hundred years, using humans to breed xenomorphs to battle in sacred, ritualistic combat. If they ever lose, they use a self destruct mechanism to make sure nothing survives, the idea being that this is why so many ancient cultures were lost to history.

The main events take place in 2004 in a pyramid in Antarctica, and the movie ends with a chestburster popping out of a Predator, creating a Predalien, a mix of xenomorph and Predator. That Predalien becomes the primary threat in Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, which takes place in rural Colorado and features some disgusting violence against pregnant women.

How the Prometheus timeline overwrites Alien vs. Predator

In my mind, all that backstory with ancient human cultures is interesting, and there are definitely parallels with the new history Ridley Scott established in Prometheus, with the Engineers replacing the Predators as the godlike beings who guided early humans. But the timeline is totally different now. Scott extended the earliest point from around 3000 BC to 3 billion BC.

If you take the Engineer and the Deacon as the genesis of any incarnation of the xenomorph, which definitely seemed to be Scott's implication, that pushes the xenomorph into the future, popping up somewhere between 2093 and 2122 instead of running around in our present day. That exact origin point seems to be what Alien: Awakening would be about.

If you really stretch things, there are ways these movies could all coexist. Maybe the Deacon wasn't the origin of the xenomorph, and elsewhere in the universe they've been locked in this millennia old ritualistic combat with the Predators. It's also possible the Predators went back in time to ancient Earth and brought a few facehuggers with them. I don't know. Stranger things have happened in movie timelines before; just look at Terminator.

My verdict: treat the crossovers as side adventures and trust Ridley Scott

As much as I love the Predator movies, I don't want to be forced to contextualize the Alien history in the Predator universe. I think it's best to consider the Alien vs. Predator crossover movies as separate side adventures that you're free to enjoy or not.

Personally, I'd rather trust Ridley Scott's vision. Bringing back the space jockey and ending Prometheus on that striking image of the Deacon suggest he's got a good idea of the overall world of the story, even if some of the characters in that world act pretty dumb sometimes.

I'm grateful to look forward to the future of this franchise again. It might never be as great as Alien and Aliens, but the existential themes, the mythology of the Engineers and the Weyland androids, and the heart pounding suspense and horror, which are still top notch, make this a series I will always be fascinated by. I'll probably be a really annoying fanboy to debate if you ever start hating on them.