
As the Alien franchise heads into new territory -- both thematically and format..ily -- with the TV series Alien: Earth, we're Weylin' our Yutanis at the seven Xeno-movies that have landed in theaters. Yes, we're gonna rank them all from worst to best, from wasteful to masterful. Did your top Alien film make it to number one? Find out below...
Read IGN's review of Alien: Earth here!
Also, are we going to completely ignore the AvP movies from 20 years ago? You bet your butt-o-morphs we are. Not only did the Alien films that followed disavow everything that was in them, but Fox considers AvP -- the movies, books, and comics -- to be a separate franchise with its own canon.
Check out our very own Alien franchise guide -- movies, games, comics, and books!
What's your top Alien flick? Is it Ridley Scott's 1979 original? James Cameron's stunning 1986 sequel? Fede Álvarez's ferocious new entry into the 45-year-old saga? We've voted amongst ourselves and come up with this official IGN ranking.
With soaring heroines played by Sigourney Weaver, Noomi Rapace, and Cailee Spaeny, menacing Machiavellian androids, and nightmare-inducing monsters whose entire bodies (inside and out) are lethal, the Alien franchise is one of the scariest and most enduring journeys in cinema history.
Warning: Some spoilers for the Alien films follow...
7. ALIEN: RESURRECTION (1997)

They were definitely thinking outside the bun with Alien: Resurrection, hiring Delicatessen co-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and setting the story 200 years after the events of Aliens and Alien 3. It has some visually gorgeous moments, but it's tonally all over the place. Sigourney Weaver came back, but she's not playing Ellen Ripley...not any version that we knew anyhow. She's a super soldier-style clone made from Ripley blood left behind from Alien 3, a rather callous fusion of humanity and Xenomorphity.
Alien: Resurrection has space pirates, a new model of android, a nefarious scientist, gnarly deaths, and the series first-ever abomination, in the form of the "Newborn," but it all unspools in messy fashion, and just like its place on the timeline, it never rises above being a funky outlier and misfire.
6. ALIEN 3 (1992)

There have been attempts to retro-redeem Alien 3, giving it the old "it's good actually" treatment, but...nah.
After initially teasing a third Alien movie set on Earth, Fox instead delivered a grim misery parade set on a remote decommissioned Weyland-Yutani prison, mostly filled with shaven-headed men donning brown rags who you couldn't tell apart. What's worse, it coldly removed the stakes that allowed 1986's Aliens to reach such emotional highs by killing off Newt and Hicks during the first few minutes and transforming the entire franchise, up until that point, into a morose tragedy.
It was also the first time the series employed CG for its Xenomorph (the "Runner"), and some of those effects haven't aged gracefully. The end result of this very troubled production, which sadly was David Fincher's first feature film (don't worry, he'd rebound with Se7en), was a story that felt like it was punishing Ellen Ripley for surviving and thriving. No, we will have none of that contrarian re-examination. This movie is a "woof."
5. ALIEN: COVENANT (2017)

Alien: Covenant is better than you remember, deepening the lore surrounding the towering, buff Engineers and Michael Fassbender's David (who becomes the perfection-seeking mad robot that develops the standard "Xenomorph" -- and the Queen -- using innocent victims in heinous experiments) while also "getting back to basics" following the wild swings of Prometheus.
It's also very much a course correction from Ridley Scott's original "new trilogy" idea, reining in the Xenomorph-free elements of Prometheus and trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. It's another new planet and another new lambs-to-slaughter situation, but this time the monsters are more familiar in design and the ramifications more or less drop us off at the doorstep of 1979's Alien (though we'll probavbly never find out the fate of David, who is still out there somewhere, living forever as a Synthetic).
Alien: Covenant also pulls a "Newt," killing off Noomi Rapace's Dr. Shaw off-screen despite the crucible she endured in Prometheus and her crusade, at the end of that movie, to take the Engineers to task. That sucks, though the harrowing horror movie-style twist at the end almost makes up for it.
4. PROMETHEUS (2012)

Ridley Scott returning to the Alien franchise after over 30 years? Not a single nerd was skeptical; all were psyched and stoked. But what Ridley Scott delivered was polarizing. Some fans were super into the new lore -- with the Engineers and the Black Goo bioweapon and the early Xeno-variations brought about by its contaminative properties -- and some thought it overly convoluted a simple, terrifying species of predatory alien, a case of a classic movie monster getting explained to death.
Ahead of the film, Scott himself said that Prometheus wasn't directly related to Alien, but that still didn't stop some from feeling deflated by this new direction. Regardless, Prometheus is gorgeous, from its costumes to its sets to its awesome effects, and it opened up a whole new corner of AI sci-fi, which Scott himself helped pioneer in a modern sense with Alien and Blade Runner. Michael Fassbender's David represents Peter Weyland's only recourse for immortality (man, billionaires hate sharing death in common with the poors, don't they), so it stands to reason that the tech CEO would travel light years to try to find out the secret to evading the Reaper.
Oh, and that MedPod C-Section scene, as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw removes the Trilobite from her abdomen? THAT's a freakin' scene, dude.
Even though Alien: Covenant isn't a bad flick, the fact that Scott didn't get to complete his original extensions of Prometheus ultimately hurt the movie, and it made it so that future films have to contend with its mythology.
Alien: Earth also explores the use of Synthetics to make humans immortal, but in a much different way. It's worth noting though that it's not using Prometheus or Alien: Covenant as source material at all, which will clearly make some fans happy.
3. ALIEN: ROMULUS (2024)

Fede Álvarez (Evil Dead, Don't Breathe) might not have added anything new to the mix, per se -- unless you count the "Offspring" creature at the end of the film -- but what he did with Alien: Romulus was take the DNA of 1979's Alien and fuse it with 2012's Prometheus, pitting a ragtag crew of miners and farmers, out to steal cryopods from a research station, against a vicious Xenomorph hive spawned from the exact same Xeno from the first movie. Yes, the one shot out into space by Ellen Ripley.
So you get the Facehuggers, the Chestbursters, and the Xenomorphs, now mixed with the Black Goo and Weyland-Yutani's wicked plans to use the Goo to evolve humans into better deep space slave laborers. Some didn't like how much it called upon past movies (with even Alien: Resurrection getting its flowers thanks to the Offspring), but in the end, Romulus is a savage, inventive heist-gone-wrong tale with amazing visuals and a fan-favorite character in David Jonsson's Andy, a faulty-but-kindly Synthetic companion. Romulus ties most everything together, which is never an easy feat; some feel it crumbles a bit under that burden, while others find it to be the balance we've been searching for.
2. ALIENS (1986)

James Cameron's first big film following The Terminator was sequel-with-no-equal Aliens, which took the slow-burn terror of Ridley Scott's Alien and blew it up. Literally. It's one of the best action movies ever made, overflowing with iconic moments and imagery. And while it's not a horror movie, like the original, it's still scary as hell. It might not be possible to make a Xenomorph movie and not have it be freaky. The moment when the Colonial Marines enter the Hive and get dismantled by the monsters living in the walls is one for the ages.
With Aliens, Cameron expanded both the Alien franchise and movie-making in general. Space marines, the Xenomorph Queen, Weyland-Yutani's scheming, a heroine who transforms from final girl to badass action hero - Aliens created a new landscape while still keeping things terrifying. It's effortlessly quotable, endlessly re-watchable, and Ellen Ripley's quest to save young Newt in the third act (whether you consider Ripley's daughter Amanda to be canon or not) is one hell of a jaw-dropping climax. Aliens is formidable sci-fi, exemplary storytelling, and just damn fun.
1. ALIEN (1979)

Unsurprisingly, Alien gets top marks here. It reshaped sci-fi, which is especially impressive in the wake of Star Wars, when everyone was looking to make space opera carbon copies. It's a space movie, a monster movie, and an exploration of AI evils, and it floored audiences with its creature effects and unforgettable Chestburster scene. While Aliens, seven years later, would be a high-octane shoot 'em up, Ridley Scott's original, written by Dan O'Bannon, is to be studied. It's a masterclass in tension and terror, perfecting the hybrid genre of space-horror. We still see the effects of Alien on cinema nearly 50 years later.
Alien features a cast of unheroic-looking blue collar workers in a very used, lived-in sci-fi environment. There's a nifty protagonist bait-and-switch, the doubling down on the idea of AI scoffing at empathy and valuing efficiency, and the background radiation of a slasher movie (complete with one of the best "Final Girls"). The movie also boasts a ridiculously beautiful production design, a sea of lights and buttons that provide a backdrop of tech malaise. Alien is an amazing experience, one to be savored.
Matt Fowler is a freelance entertainment writer/critic, covering TV news, reviews, interviews and features on IGN for 17 years.