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The WYCU

This has been on my mind for a little bit, ever since last summer when seeing Alien:Romulus in the theatre. Of course, that along with Deadpool and Wolverine led to our exploration of the Nostalgia curve. But following Romulus a discussion with a friend led to the discussion of the shared timelines of the Alien and Predator franchises, and the realization that I haven’t actually seen most of the Predator films, save for the first two, and still hadn’t gotten around to seeing the well-regarded Prey either.

I was due for re-watch, or watch in many cases.

So with learning today about Alien: Earth, a new TV series set in the Alien universe will be coming to streaming in the summer of 2025, I thought it was time to start that re-watch. However, that’s a lot of movies to get through before summer, and we’ve still got Andor season 2 and some other projects going on too.

(Yes, my media consumption occurs at a glacial pace; I get enough free time to get through maybe one or two movies a week.)

But…

What if we watched our way through the WYCU chronologically?

The WYCU is the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, of course, one of the key pieces of memetic connective tissue between the two (aside from the xenomorph skull inside the predator ship in Predator 2. It’s amazing how much inspiration comes from a little piece of throw-away set dressing.) Weyland Yutani, W-Y for short, is the interstellar megacorp behind much of the machinations of the Alien franchise, and they have their hand in the going on of the Predator-verse as well. Much like CHOAM from the Dune franchise, they’ve spread across the galaxy, and have their fingers (or talons?) in pretty much everything.

I think I’ve we’ve mentioned it in passing when talking about our EvilCorp series, a look at the MegaCorps that permeate the science fiction settings of the future, showing up in everything from present-day cyberpunk settings like Shadowrun to the aforementioned Dune 20000 years in the future.

(If I haven’t mentioned EvilCorp yet, then here’s where we started.)

But we digress: what about the WYCU chronologically? The list has been laid our by others (find a link), so we’re by no means the first, but the nice thing is with Alien: Earth set 2 years before the original 1979 Alien film, it means a chronological re-watch mostly involves the Predator franchise (and about an hour of Prometheus).

Sorry, by chronological I mean by within the continuity, not release order. This, this has some potential. There’s only 9 movies or so to “catch-up” to the continuity before Alien: Earth comes out in “summer 2025”. We can do this.

For fun, and future reference, here’s what the WCYU chronology looks like:

WCYU Chronology

Title	‘Verse	Year	Chrono Order
Prometheus *	A	2012	1
Prey	P	2022	2
Predator	P	1987	3
Predator 2	P	1990	4
Alien v Predator	X	2004	5
Alien v Predator 2: Requiem	X	2007	6
The Predator	P	2018	7
Predators	P	2010	8
Predator: Badlands***	P	2025	9
Prometheus **	A	2012	10
Alien: Covenant	A	2017	11
Alien: Earth	A	2025	12
Alien	A	1979	13
Alien: Romulus	A	2024	14
Aliens	A	1986	15
Alien³	A	1992	16
Alien: Resurrection	A	1997	17

*: the first bit of Prometheus, in the distant past
**: the rest of the movie, as it appears in the main timeline
***: there's also a rumored stealth Predator movie slated for 2025 that may come out before Badlands, but we probably won't see that until it's too late

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Having sworn off the extended Alien franchise after finding myself hating both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant back-to-back, I was surprised to find me watching this on the opening weekend. Good word of mouth from a few friends whose opinions I trust had me checking it out, in IMAX no less, in a late afternoon matinee.

And surprise, it’s good!

Now, the challenge with any movie in a franchise with 45 years of history is to deal with the accumulated weight of expectations, of both the hardcore fans and casual movie-going public, and even those lapsed fans like myself. So, to achieve some modest success in creating a movie that is genuinely terrifying, and expands on the universe, fitting in as a piece in the larger story, and leaving room for more development later, is no easy task. Well done on all those involved.

That isn’t to say it’s perfect: there are a few scenes that feel like level design in a video game adaptation, which has been an ongoing trend in movies since at least the Star Wars prequels. It’s the curse of cinema in the new millennium. And a couple notable lines that tie too close to the past movies in the franchise fell flat, not having enough room to breathe. But these quibbles aside, it was a fine film, that never felt like it dragged, and kept the tension up throughout.

There’s room to expand the Alien universe off this; more with Andy, obviously. But I’d also like to see a wider universe, beyond the Weyland-Yutani corporation, and see what other approaches to outer space there might be. Because in a galaxy where the Xenomorph is a solution, what kind of problems might lurk out there?

The Shape of the Curve

Lost in all the excitement of this new idea, I realize I forgot to actually show you what the curve looks like. Whoops. Let’s rectify that.

The first challenge is that the curve is still under development; this is all a work in progress, an act of thinking by writing, if you will. The second challenge is that my skills in data science and graphic design are somewhat lacking. (The overall website design should have been a hint). Nevertheless, we’ll try our best; though we’re currently stuck somewhere between MS Paint and R.

For the sake of example, we’ll use the Star Trek series released during the Streaming Era that we mentioned in our initial post as data points along the curve. The shape of the curve will depend on some choices we make. Let’s see what our options look like.

Curve 1: Nostalgia vs. Novelty

If we picture series (or media titles, generally) as containing elements that evoke either Nostalgia in the audience, then we can quantify* that in some form. This degree of nostalgia would exist along a continuum, where we can say something is more or less nostalgic relative to other titles in the brand. With the Star Trek Streaming Titles (ST:ST for short), that continuum might look something like this:

Star Trek is not unique in long-running media titles, in that they all trade in nostalgia to a degree, but here we see titles like Picard and Strange New Worlds leaning heavily on other characters, settings, and aesthetics to bring the audience on board, where as Discovery and Prodigy are further removed.

This is useful, but a more complete look at Nostalgia might contrast this with Novelty, where something new is introduced to the setting or the larger universe, and the traditional tropes and aesthetics of the universe are muted. Here we can see that Nostalgia isn’t absent with the more Novel titles, but their focus on Novelty moves them further along the curve.

However, this isn’t the only way we can picture the Curve, so it may be useful to lay out some alternative formulations.

Curve 2: Real vs Imagined

One way to think about Nostalgia is to think about the extent it is real or simply imagined, on the part of the audience. (I guess that creatives and other content producers can be part of this audience as well, as it’s not uncommon for the producers to be fans or marks for the product, but that’s an aside for a later date.)

Real nostalgia would be the fans longing for something that was actually produced (and published) in the past. It can be cited, looked at, enjoyed. Imagined nostalgia would be for something that the audience think they have seen, but never actually happened. For a more recent example, we could look deeper at some of the elements in Deadpool & Wolverine, like the yellow costume, or Gambit’s appearance in the film.

Neither of them actually happened before; they’re both adaptations of elements that have shown up previously in other media. Granted, the nature of transmedia storytelling necessarily means that there is going to be a lot of adaptation going around. The audience is doing a lot of the lifting here, getting something (close to) what they think they wanted.

Mapping real v. imagined nostalgia, this is what the ST:ST curve would look like:

Less of a curve, and more of a straight slope downhill. Hmm. But wait, in the previous post we also talked about the “incepted” nostalgia, that which was created by the content producers to evoke nostalgia. What does that look like for the ST:ST titles?

Curve 3: Organic vs. Manufactured

Organic nostalgia is that experienced by the audience on their own. It is somewhat inherent in the thing. Again, this can occur due to elements, aesthetics, and tropes of the shared universe, but it is on the audience. Organic nostalgia is also related to curve 2, as both real and imagined nostalgia could count as “organic”, having been experienced by the audience.

Manufactured nostalgia is that incepted form. Something brought in for the express purpose of pushing the audience’s nostalgia button. And Star Trek as a franchise pushes this button hard, with each series relying on it to some degree.

So much so that “series” may not be the right analytic unit for this. It may be worthwhile to go inter- or intra- series for the analysis, comparing the series on an episodic basis, or comparing the series versus other series for other franchises.

Current Examples

What is driving the current trend? The summer box office seems to be thriving on it. This series of posts was originally spawned by the release of Deadpool & Wolverine in late July 2024, and as I’m working on the next part Alien: Romulus has been released, drawing heavily on James Cameron’s (1986) Aliens, so much so that people are pointing out shot-for-shot scene comparisons where the A:R directly compares. This happened in D&W as well, with fight choreography coming directly from Sam Raimi’s (2002) Spider-Man, among many other elements.

And these movies are doing well, with positive word of mouth circulating about each film. So something is in the air. What else is pushing us along the Nostalgia Curve?