The Box Office Performance of Alien: Romulus

NOTE: This post is a derivative of a reply to a reader's comment back in October. The original post, and exchange, may be found here.

I previously declined to venture a comment about Alien: Romulus because when thinking about a film's likely or actual performance I tend to look for close points of comparison and extrapolate from that. This was until recently fairly easy with the Marvel movies, for example, because there were so many of them released so close together that it was possible to find very close precedents and search for trends among them. It was a lot harder with the Alien movies because they have been very widely separated over time, with a certain amount of variety among them, while I wasn't sure what kind of Alien movie Romulus would be (whether it would be more action- or horror-oriented, whether it would be more or less attentive to the "mythology" of the series). It seemed to me possible that the movie could add to the long list of underperforming franchise films of the last couple of years, but also possible it would do better, and in the end it has been a modest success. Even when we adjust for inflation Alien: Romulus seems to have done a little better domestically and internationally than 2017's Covenant (picking up $350 million worldwide, versus the $310 million or so Covenant made in today's dollars). That still leaves it a pretty long way away from the heights reached by the first two movies (the original Alien was almost an $800 million hit in today's terms), and the top rank of blockbusters today (the $1 billion+ grossers), but given that it more than quadrupled the reported production budget ($80 million) it is almost certainly turning a decent profit by today's standards ($100 million+ not out of the question when we take into account the post-theatrical income streams).

Especially given how Hollywood remains committed to the "franchise film," and how so many of the latest franchise films are doing a lot less well than Alien has just done, it is unsurprising that Fox has already decided to continue the franchise. So far as I know development of that next film is still in its early stages, but I would not be surprised if the backers decided to get a little more ambitious, aiming for something more than a relatively low-budgeted August release the next time around--maybe profitably, maybe not.