Alien: Romulus has arrived to bring the Xenomorph back to the big screen, and it might just make you want to rewatch the series.
But what order do you watch the seven Alien movies released so far? (Yes, we’re ignoring the two Alien vs Predator films.)
You can go with the simple release order strategy, but if you want to go more in-depth, you can also look at them in chronological order.
We’re here to help you with the definitive Alien timeline, including how to watch the Alien films in release order and chronology, and a detailed timeline of exactly when the events took place.
Alien movies in order of release
The easiest way to rewatch the Alien series is to watch them in the order they were originally released.
If you want to watch both Alien vs Predator films, here’s a better idea: they came out in 2004 and 2007, between Alien: Resurrection and Prometheus.
We advise against it and they are not necessary for your understanding, so we have omitted them from the release order below.
These are the Alien films in order of release:
• Alien (1979)
• Aliens (1986)
• Alien 3 (1992)
• Alien: Resurrection (1997)
• Prometheus (2012)
• Alien: Covenant (2017)
• Alien: Romulus (2024)
Alien Movies In Chronological Order: Where Is Alien: Romulus Set?
Unlike other long-running series, the Alien films are fairly easy to watch in chronological order, if you prefer.
Alien: Romulus doesn’t do Halloween and forget all the other movies, so there’s no worry about branching timelines. It’s set in 2142, 20 years after Alien and 37 years before the events of Aliens.
As with the release order, we’ve left the Alien vs Predator films out of this chronological order. If you really want to watch them as part of your rewatch, they take place before the events of all the other films, save for the opening of Prometheus.
Here are the Alien films in chronological order:
• Prometheus
• Alien: Covenant
• Extraterrestrial
• Alien: Romulus
• Aliens
• Alien 3
• Alien: Resurrection
Alien Timeline
If you really want a detailed look at every major event in the Alien films so far, we’ve got you covered with the definitive Alien timeline.
(We focused on the films and left out the broader canon works, as we would be working on them all year.)
4 billion – 2 million BC – An alien race, later called “The Engineers,” visits Earth and leaves behind one of their own kind. His body breaks down after he drinks black goo, and his DNA ends up in the water, where it recombines to create life.
35,000 BC – Evidence from the engineers in Scotland.
3590 BC – Sumerian evidence of engineers visiting Earth.
2470 BC – Egyptian evidence of engineers visiting Earth.
1540 BC – Babylonian evidence of engineers visiting Earth.
8th century BC – the myth of Prometheus (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 visiting Earth.
1st century AD – The Engineers prepare a “death ship” filled with jars of black goo to send to Earth to destroy their wayward children, humanity. (The decapitated Engineer found by the Prometheus crew on LV-223 was carbon dated to 2,000 years earlier, “plus or minus.”)
1990 – Peter Weyland, the man who will found the Weyland Corp., is born.
2004 – Aliens and Predators do things. Together. If you’ve seen the AvP movies, you know it’s best to move on.
2012 – Peter Weyland founds Weyland Corp, the company behind so many doomed space missions.
Around 2030 – Weyland creates David, an android.
2080s – Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and Dr. Charlie Holloway discover evidence for “star maps” from the Babylonian, Sumerian, Mayan, Egyptian and Mesopotamian eras.
2089 – Shaw discovers another star chart, or “invitation,” in a cave on the Isle of Skye, Scotland.
2091 – The USCSS Prometheus, a spaceship built by Weyland Corp., leaves Earth for its journey to LV-223.
2092 – Ellen Ripley is born on Earth. (January 7th, to be exact.)
2093 – All but two of the Prometheus crew are killed after an encounter on LV-223 with an alien race and a reanimated Engineer. The ship is destroyed, and Dr. Shaw and a badly damaged David set sail on an Engineer ship to find the Engineer homeworld.
2094 – Shaw presumably rebuilds David, and according to David’s testimony in Alien: Covenant, he and Shaw arrive on “Paradise,” a planet housing millions of Engineers. He uses their ship’s toxic black-goo cargo to wipe out the entire population.
2104 – Covenant, a colonization ship carrying thousands of humans and embryos, makes a detour to an unnamed planet (Paradise) on its way to Origae-6. There the crew discovers David and a new species, the neomorph.
After the invasion of the planet, where most of the crew is 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.
2120 – Spaceship Nostromo leaves Earth.
2122 – After detecting a signal, Nostromo lands on planetoid LV-426. After being infected by an alien facehugger, Executive Officer Kane dies when an alien bursts through his chest. He picks off the crew one by one, leaving Ripley and Jones, the ship’s cat, alive.
2142 – A group of young colonists, including Rain and her synthetic “brother” Andy, from Jackson’s Star mining colony break into Weyland-Yutani Station, the Renaissance, only to discover it is conducting experiments on the original Xenomorph. Chaos and death ensue.
2179 – After wandering in a state of 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.
They arrive with a military team and find the sole human survivor, Newt, more face-huggers, a swarm of aliens and a pretty badass Queen. Ripley escapes with Newt, Corporal Hicks and android Bishop and heads back to Earth in the Sulaco.
There must be at least two facehuggers on board, and while they are asleep, one impregnates Ripley with a queen. Somehow, a fire starts and the human life pod shoots out, landing at a penal colony on Fiorina 161. Only Ripley and another facehugger survive. Ripley kills the resulting alien and then commits suicide by jumping into a furnace.
2379 – The United Systems Military clones Ripley (and her bio-passenger) from medical samples salvaged from Fiorina 161. They surgically remove the alien queen to breed the species, several of which escape aboard the Auriga, killing many.
Auriga crashes into Earth’s atmosphere and explodes. The Ripley clone meanwhile escapes aboard the Betty with the android Call.
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