This weekend, audiences didn’t, to quote Ripley, “stay away from her,” as Alien: Romulus, the horror/sci-fi sequel/prequel, roared to a $40M+ opening in North America alone. Set directly after the first Alien and before the second, Fede Álvarez’s hit channels the visuals of the originals while featuring a cast of up-and-comers, inducing Civil War star Cailee Spaeny. So what better time to look back at the whole franchise and see which is best. We took the critics’ score and the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and averaged them out to find the worst and best Alien franchise film. Read on to see which takes #1.
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9. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
Fox
Critics: 12%. Audience: 30%. Average: 21%. Coming in dead last is this cynical cash-in, in which the dreadlocked Predator faces off against the Aliens in a non-canonical sequel to a spinoff. “The world’s most illogical and boring action-horror grudge match between two dull trademarked franchise monsters is back on,” wrote the Guardian in one of the nicer reviews. “Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem is literally shrouded in darkness, and the only explicable reason for this pitch-black visual schema is that the filmmakers understood it was better if no one could see the **** they were shooting,” said Slant.
8. Alien vs. Predator (2004)
Fox
Critics: 22%. Audience: 39%. Average: 30.5%. “Whoever wins…we lose” was the tagline for this film, the most memorable part about it. “The title alone betrays an entire Hollywood mindset of rehash, reheat, recombine. Re-please,” said Time Out. “It crawls along for an enervating hour or so in the mud of murky exposition, then seizes up in an underlit fit of incoherent fight scenes and gotchas – all endured with a straight face by slumming lead warrior princess Sanaa Lathan, who surely has better things to do.”
7. Alien Resurrection (1997)
Fox
Critics: 55%. Audience: 39%. Average: 47%. Continuing the trend of handing an Alien movie to a director with signature visual flair, Alien Resurrection places a Joss Whedon script in the hands of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the Frenchman behind Delicatessen and, later, Amélie. His steampunk visuals impressed but unfortunately, the characters (Ron Perlman and Winona Ryder among them) are mostly yelly. “Alien Resurrection checks in with enough slime, gore and scary monster-flick moments to satisfy undemanding audiences. But it’s an ugly, animated corpse of a movie stitched together from the other three films in the series,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter at the time.
6. Alien 3 (1992)
Fox
Critics: 44%. Audience: 46%. Average: 45%. Directed by David Fincher—at least until the studio chopped it up—this green and grimy sequel did the unthinkable and killed off two beloved characters from Aliens…. before the film even starts. For many viewers, it was all downhill from there, as Ripley, head-shaven, finds herself in a prison colony full of sweaty men looking to do her harm—until the aliens harm them first. Derided for its ending and dour tone, Alien 3 has been appreciated as Fincher’s stature has grown. But at the time: “One assumes that Weaver received enough combat pay to compensate for playing the now understandably cynical Ripley in this bleak and pointlessly grueling movie,” wrote the New York Daily News.
5. Alien: Covenant (2017)
Fox
Critics: 65%. Audience: 55%. Average: 60%. Ridley Scott’s sequel, the second in a planned “David” trilogy, left some critics scratching their heads as philosophical mumbo jumbo was interspersed between characters doing things smart humans would never do. Still, the director is a master of his craft. “Even if the twists and turns in the plot aren’t too hard to see coming, there’s a distinct joy that [Ridley] Scott takes in setting up and setting off each of those traps,” said Slashfilm.
4. Prometheus (2012)
Fox
Critics: 73%.Audience: 68%. Average: 70.5%. Ridley Scott returned to the universe he created and made a film about aliens, yes, but also the meaning of life. “Prometheus recaptures the essence of not only a beloved franchise, but also an admired yet complicated genre many filmmakers attempt but few successfully. In short, it shows the amateurs how it’s really done,” wrote Reel Talk. “Even if the movie’s logic ultimately spirals down into a vortex of hysteria, horror and hokum, I enjoyed the bulldozer intensity of the climax, which barely keeps a lid on the crackpot cult movie that’s wrestling for the soul of this… blockbuster,” added CNN.
3. Alien: Romulus (2024)
Fox
Critics: 81%. Audience (as of Sunday, August 18th, opening weekend): 86%. Average: 83.5%. Summing it up nicely: “Alien: Romulus is a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure horror story with boos and splatter. It doesn’t have much on its mind, but it has some good jump scares along with a disappointingly bland heroine, a sympathetic android, and the usual collection of disposable characters who are unduly killed by slavering, rampaging extraterrestrials,” said the reviewer in the New York Times.
2. Alien (1979)
Fox
Critics: 93%. Audience: 94%. Average: 93.5%. The one that started it all misses the number one spot by .5 percent. It’s proof the top two could really go either way. “Alien will scare the peanuts right out of your M&M’s. It was about time someone made a science-fiction thriller that thrills… and just boils everything down to the pure, ravishingly vulgar essence of fright,” wrote Newsweek at the time. “Miss Weaver, a New York actress making her film debut, makes the most of the opportunity without overdoing it. She suggests toughness and fear in equal measure,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer.
1. Aliens (1986)
Fox
Critics: 94%. Audience: 94%. Average: 94%. James Cameron’s masterpiece traded the slow burn of Alien for a gung-ho marine slasher and changed moviegoing forever. “The ads for Aliens claim that this movie will frighten you as few movies have, and, for once, the ads don’t lie. The movie is so intense that it creates a problem for me as a reviewer: Do I praise its craftsmanship, or do I tell you it left me feeling wrung out and unhappy?,” wrote Roger Ebert in 1986. “I have never seen a movie that maintains such a pitch of intensity for so long; it’s like being on some kind of hair-raising carnival ride that never stops.”