Alien: Romulus Box Office Scores Strong Preview Night

Alien: Romulus is over 80% "fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes and on pace for a strong opening weekend.

By Russ Burlingame

Alien: Romulus netted $6.5 million in Thursday night previews, setting a pace for a likely $50 million-plus opening weekend. The movie, widely regarded as the best Alien movie in decades, stars Cailee Spaeny, and has been tracking for a $40 million or better opening, but the $6.5 million previews puts it closer to things like A Quiet Place: Day One (which got $6.7 million on Thursday, leading to a $52 million opening weekend) or Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes ($6.6 million/$58 million). Theater has a pretty good Thursday in general, with both It Ends With Us and Deadpool & Wolverine earning over $4 million despite not being in their first frame.

The movie is set in the same universe as Ridley Scott's Alien movies, but seeks to chart its own course and win back viewers who may feel alienated (pun intended) after a number of lackluster outings for the series. The movie centers on a group of astronauts who find themselves trapped with a monster while trying to scavenge from an abandoned space station, basically creating a sci-fi version of every slasher flick that culminated with a bunch of teens trapped in a house or campground with the killer.  

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 82% score on Rotten Tomatoes after 186 reviews have been counted. That's good enough to earn a Certified Fresh designation from the review-aggregation site.

Alien, the iconic film that launched the decades-long franchise, has spawned a multimedia universe including comic books, video games, novels, and more merch and collectibles than you can shake a stick at. 

Alien: Romulus follows in the footsteps of 20th Century Studios' Prey, which took applied an interesting director's vision to the Predator franchise in the hopes of revitalizing it after years of disappointing sequels.

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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.

Alien: Romulus is in theaters now.

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