A few weeks ago, we laid out the timeline for the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe, the WYCU, and in the footnotes we mentioned the rumours of an unnamed Predator project due to come out in 2025.
And this week, that rumour was confirmed:
We have Season 4 of Deadliest Warrior coming out on June 6th. Predator:KoK is set up as an anthology movie, with three arcs, following Vikings, Samurai, and WWII US fighter pilots (in what looks to be the Pacific theatre). Interesting alternatives, and I’m really excited to see how they come to the screen.
This should land somewhere in the middle of our WYCU rewatch, so we’ll likely step back for a special episode to cover it during the middle of our chronology.
Join us online as we shout “Who… Is… Deadliest?” at the screen and online.
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
