Alien: Romulus Delivers Franchise’s Best Rotten Tomatoes Score in Nearly 40 Years

The Alien franchise is once again preparing to invade theaters across the country, this time on the backs of some of the strongest reviews the series has experienced in quite a while. Alien: Romulus, the new film from Evil Dead director Fede Alvarez, takes the franchise back to its roots, attempting to recreate some of the claustrophobic terror found in Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic. The result is a chilling film that many critics have quickly fallen in love with.

The first big wave of reviews for Alien: Romulus arrived on Wednesday afternoon and the film has quickly earned the best Rotten Tomatoes score for the franchise since James Cameron’s Aliens, which was released back in 1986. At the time of writing this article, Alien: Romulus has an 80% score on Rotten Tomatoes after 86 reviews have been counted. That’s good enough to earn a Certified Fresh designation.

As you could probably guess, the first two Alien movies are the best-reviewed of the franchise. Ridley Scott’s Alien has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, while James Cameron’s Aliens carries a 94%. The following four films all received Rotten scores on the review aggregate site. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant both received Fresh scores, but neither were able to reach the 75% mark.

Romulus shares a lot of DNA with the original Alien, taking the series back to its horror roots and focusing on a smaller story. That has piqued the interest of fans, but also made it intimidating for Alvarez to share his work with Ridley Scott. Fortunately, the man who started the franchise loved the new entry.

“He walks into the room and he did say, ‘Fede, what can I say? It’s fucking great,’” Álvarez shared previously. “For me it was like…My family knows it was one of the best moments of my life to have a master like him, who I admired so much, to even watch a movie I made – but particularly something like this…and talk to me for an hour about what he liked about it. One of the best compliments he said was, ‘The dialogue is great. Are you the writer?’ Yes!”

Alien: Romulus stars Cailee Spaeny (Civil War), David Jonsson (Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy), Archie Renaux (Shadow and Bone), Isabela Merced (The Last of Us), Spike Fearn (Aftersun), and Aileen Wu. Fede Álvarez (Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe) directs from a screenplay he wrote with frequent collaborator Rodo Sayagues (Don’t Breathe 2) based on characters created by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett.