A new Alien film is moving forward at 20th Century Studios, with Ridley Scott producing and Prisoners writer Aaron Guzikowski writing the screenplay. The news was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline has since confirmed it.
The project is still in very early development. No director is attached, no cast has been announced, and plot details remain under wraps. J.R. Young is overseeing the film for the studio.
Scott will produce through his Scott Free banner, alongside Michael Pruss. He is not set to direct the film at this stage. Guzikowski previously worked with Scott on Raised by Wolves, the HBO Max science-fiction series he created, which Scott executive produced and directed the first two episodes of.
The new film is not a sequel to Alien: Romulus, the 2024 film that revived the franchise at the box office. That sequel is in limbo after director Fede Alvarez stepped back from it in September last year.
Instead, the new project is linked to the prequels Scott directed, Prometheus from 2012 and Alien: Covenant from 2017. Sources say the android David, played by Michael Fassbender in both films, is the connective tissue between those films and the new one. Fassbender is not currently attached to return.
A return to the prequels
The link to Prometheus and Covenant matters because those films asked bigger questions than a simple creature story. They explored creation, artificial intelligence and the Engineers, the ancient beings behind human life in the series.
Both films divided fans and critics. Prometheus and Covenant also introduced David’s disturbing attempts to become a creator himself, after first appearing as a helpful android in Prometheus and turning into an antagonist in Covenant.
Scott has not hidden his interest in finishing that story. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in August, he said he still hoped to make a third prequel centred on David. He hinted that David had been busy creating a brave new world for himself, and warned that artificial intelligence can go off like a bomb.
Guzikowski looks like a natural fit for that material. Raised by Wolves dealt regularly with religion, artificial life and human beings discovering that the myths around their existence were stranger than they expected. Those ideas already live inside the version of Alien that Scott explored in his later films.
The franchise has shown recently that it can support very different versions of itself at the same time. Alien: Romulus returned to the claustrophobic creature horror of the early films and grossed 350.9 million dollars against an 80 million dollar budget. Alien: Earth expanded the world through television, and it has been renewed for a second season that begins filming next year.
Alien: Covenant, by contrast, underperformed with 242 million dollars against a 110 million dollar budget. That result put the prequel strand on ice for years, until this new hire reopened it.
Harry Potter already costs $200m
The Alien news arrived in the same week as a striking figure from another major franchise. HBO’s Harry Potter television series has already passed 200 million dollars in costs before audiences have seen a single episode.
The figure comes from UK earnings filings for Plum Jam Productions, the HBO-owned company behind the series. The company reported revenue of 130.6 million pounds, nearly 175 million dollars, in 2025, when the series began production at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden.
Its revenue in 2024, when preparations began, was 18.4 million pounds, about 25 million dollars. Taken together, the filings point to around 150 million pounds, just over 200 million dollars, spent on setting up the series so far.
The first Harry Potter movie was made for 125 million dollars from start to finish. Simply building the television version and getting it into production has already cost considerably more than that, and the series is still two months away from its premiere on Christmas Day on HBO and HBO Max.
There is an important caveat in the numbers. The filings use company revenue as a guide to spending, and Plum Jam has housed other productions in the past, including The Nevers, when it used the name Roundabout Productions. Not every pound in its accounts may belong to Harry Potter, and HBO declined to comment on the figures.
Even with that caution, the scale is clear. A person familiar with the matter told TheWrap that episodic budgets are on par with HBO’s world-building shows like House of the Dragon, valued at 15 to 20 million dollars an episode, and The Last of Us, at 10 to 15 million dollars an episode.
The final season of Game of Thrones reportedly cost about 15 million dollars an episode. On an eight-episode season, the Harry Potter filings work out to about 25.2 million dollars per episode, though that is an estimate, not a confirmed per-episode cost.
Building Hogwarts to last
Much of the early money is not episodes at all, but infrastructure. HBO is rebuilding Hogwarts and the surrounding wizarding world, with sets, costumes and facilities built once to serve a planned seven-season run, one book per season.
Only the first two seasons have been officially greenlit so far, with production on season two kicking off this autumn. The build even includes a school building for the child actors to attend for the next decade.
Newcomer Dominic McLaughlin leads the young cast as Harry, and production is based at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden in England, the longtime home of the Harry Potter films. The show is a faithful new adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s books, with each season set to tell one book.
Spending huge sums does not automatically make a series feel magical. HBO has bought the physical tools to build an unusually detailed Wizarding World. The creative challenge will be convincing audiences who already know these stories well that experiencing them again is worth up to seven years of television.
For Alien, the challenge is different but just as real. The new film must honour a prequel story that many fans found fascinating and others found frustrating, without a director or a star yet in place. For Harry Potter, the money is already spent. Now the show has to prove it was worth it.
