Fox has signed “Loving” director Jeff Nichols to write and direct a remake of 1988’s science-fiction thriller “Alien Nation.”

Nichols is reteaming with “Loving” producers Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Sara Greene for the new “Alien Nation” movie. The deal comes two days ahead of “Loving” making its North American premiere on Sunday at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The original “Alien Nation” was set in Los Angeles after 300,000 members of an enslaved alien race — “The Newcomers” — landed in the Mojave Desert. James Caan starred as police officer partnered with an alien, played by Mandy Patinkin.

“Alien Nation,” produced by Gale Anne Hurd and Richard Kobritz, was a moderate success with a $25 million gross. Fox launched a spinoff TV series, starring Gary Graham and Eric Pierpoint, which ran for 22 episodes.

“Loving,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, stars Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton as Mildred and Richard Loving, who were jailed because interracial marriage was against the law in Virginia. Focus will open “Loving” on Nov. 4.

Nichols’ directing credits include “Midnight Special,” “Take Shelter” and “Mud.” He’s repped by CAA. The news was first reported by Deadline Hollywood.

From Shotgun Stories to Take Shelter to Mud, Jeff Nichols’ has made his name as an indie filmmaker who refuses to yield to mainstream expectations. Just look at Midnight Special, a sci-fi thriller that avoided any kind of exposition, or his new biopic, Loving, which is more of a love story than a didactic political drama. Considering the originality of Nichols’ work, it’s a little surprising that the director’s next project will be a remake of 1988 sci-fi movie Alien Nation. But even that film won’t be what you’d expect.

Last month, Deadline revealed Nichols will write and direct the film for 20th Century Fox after Iron Man scribes Art Marcum and Matt Holloway left the project. The 1988 buddy cop thriller starred James Caan as a racist police officer reluctantly teaming up with Mandy Patinkin’s extraterrestrial for a murder case. While talking to Nichols about his upcoming drama Loving, the filmmaker told me his Alien Nation won’t be a remake at all. “It’s pretty much my idea,” he said. “It doesn’t really have anything to do with the original.” The only connection between the 1988 movie and Nichols’ screenplay is the title.

Fox called to ask me to do that. I said, ‘No.’ But I had been working on this bigger idea of my own and then I thought about it said, well you know, that’s a good title. And that title could go on to my bigger idea, then maybe I might actually get a chance to get it made. So in that sense I’m currently building it the same way I built all my other movies, meaning kind of from the ground up.

Set in 1991, the original film takes place a year after a ship carrying 300,000 extraterrestrials landed on Earth. The film explores the tensions between the aliens and the humans who live among each other in Los Angeles. While Nichols at first turned down the project, he saw potential for his own idea, which explores the time between an alien arrival and when they merge with society:

With Alien Nation you’re looking at a society that was already built, they were already integrated into the society. And if you go back further and you think about those early days, that’s what I was focusing on.

The old Alien Nation is essentially about racism and xenophobia through the lens of science fiction, and it sounds like Nichols’ movie will focus on the onset of those tensions. It’s a topic that couldn’t be more relevant today, especially in light of a Trump presidential campaign, and it makes sense coming from Nichols. He’s already tackled sci-fi with Midnight Special and in Loving he explores the emotional angle of a historical story about an interracial couple in the late 1950s. Both of those films explore similar themes of otherness and alienation, looking at the tensions and fears that arise from difference. If Alien Nation is anything like Nichols’ recent work, we’re in store for something special.

There’s one remaining question though: Will there be a role for Nichols’ regular Michael Shannon in the new movie? “Gosh, I hope so,” the director told me. We’ve already seen Shannon as an extraterrestrial, but maybe this time he’ll actually have flippers for hands.

Loving opens in limited theaters on November 4.


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In the hands of director Jeff Nichols, the Alien Nation remake is not going to be just another buddy cop movie. When the news broke that Nichols was going to remake Graham Baker‘s entertaining sci-fi crime movie, it was hard imagining Nichols cranking out a routinely faithful remake. While the 20th Century Fox project could be his biggest project yet if it’s given the green light, the filmmaker says the story is just as personal as his previous films.

The original movie is a conventional but well-done L.A. cop movie with a sci-fi twist: three years after aliens came to earth, they’re now our neighbors, co-workers, and dance teachers. While well-intentioned, the film is a little too surface-level when it comes to its depiction of racism and xenophobia. The remake, however, may dig deeper than the original.

When we asked Nichols how the tumultuous last couple of years have influenced his writing, he replied: “How could it not? Just wait until you see Alien Nation.” Now, whether we’ll see it depends on how Disney’s purchase of 20th Century Fox unfolds, but whatever happens, Nichols is staying positive about his next potential movie.

Here’s what the Mud and Take Shelter director had to say about the Alien Nation remake:

So I’ve been working on Alien Nation like for two years, the screenplay. And I’m still … I’m almost done with it. I’m hoping this draft that I’m working on now will be my last. The studio seems to really love it, and we’re working on conception design of the aliens and everything else, and it happens to be a studio that’s being bought by Disney right now. I’m working with Fox on it, so it feels a little bit like you’re one of those monks doing those giant murals in sand. It might just blow away, which would be a real shame, but everybody at Fox has been so good to me about it. And they’re so positive about it, obviously I’m trying to stay in the positive zone, and hopefully knock out this last draft.

It’s epic. I mean, it’s the biggest canvas I’ve ever painted on, but it 100 percent feels like a Jeff Nichols film, which I’m sure there are gonna be some Alien Nation fans out there that are like, “What the fuck?” But my hope is if they … If people come to it just ready for a new story, that they’ll like it. And I put my heart and soul into it. To be the project that’s supposed to be me being a sell out, it is like the least … I’m not saying that to save face or be cool. I put so much of myself into it, it takes place in Arkansas. There’s so much of me in it.

When you’re making something that big, there’s just so many things that are out of your control. In a weird way, all you can control and concentrate on is the creative aspect. The winds will blow you where they blow you, but as long as you’re telling to where you want to tell, and whenever that stops, then you gotta raise your hand and go, “Guys, this isn’t gonna work for me anymore.”

But so far, that’s not been the case. So hopefully Alien Nation goes, I’ve got a couple of things that I won’t say are more serious films, because Alien Nation is actually pretty serious, but there’s a lot more traditional kind of adult movies. I’ve got a couple of those but I haven’t settled on one, and then I’ve got a really another big PG, PG-13 kind of like summer blockbuster family film, which makes it sound real lame, but it’s not. It’s more like Mud, but with some bigger fantastical elements in it.

With his independent films, Nichols was able to make some grand images with limited resources, so the potential of his vision backed by a huge budget could be something to witness and a real event film. He’s already written and directed Midnight Special, a sci-fi movie with great substance, emotion, and spectacle, so his return to the genre is more than promising. Especially if Alien Nation stars Michael Shannon as an alien.

Jeff Nichols, the filmmaker behind movies like Take Shelter, Mud, and Midnight Special, is one of the best directors who isn’t quite a household name yet. But his next planned project, a big budget remake of the 1988 sci-fi buddy cop film Alien Nation, seemed poised to launch his career to the next level. Unfortunately, that movie ended up becoming a casualty of Disney’s acquisition of Fox, which was a big disappointment – but the project has since mutated into a different form.

According to Nichols, he has converted his movie screenplay into a series of scripts for a 10-episode television show, and Disney is currently deciding if they’re going to move ahead with this version of the story instead of the movie. Read his quotes below.

Nichols and his cinematographer Adam Stone were guests on a recent episode of the Team Deakins podcast, in which Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins and his wife and collaborator James Deakins interview fellow filmmakers, and Nichols was asked if he would ever work on a TV show or miniseries. “[Alien Nation] is a possible series that might happen in the near future,” Stone butted in, and Nichols followed up with some more detail.

“Yeah, I’m working on a series right now,” the director confirmed, explaining the backstory about how Fox came to him after his 2016 film Loving and asked if he wanted to put his spin on Alien Nation. After initially turning down the studio’s offer, Nichols had a change of heart. “I then had this idea of how I could take that title but a situation that has nothing to do with the original movie, necessarily, and I got really excited about it…I spent three years building out an entire alien civilization and this situation and this setup and all these characters, and it’s really what I’ve been doing for a long time. We were set to go make it. It was going to be our next big challenge for Adam and I, which would be making a big, $100 million studio film, still in Arkansas. Disney bought Fox and killed it, which was a little soul-crushing, to say the least.”

That happened in 2019, but since then, the folks at Disney have evidently had a change of heart.

“But they came and said, ‘Would you consider turning this into a series, potentially?'” Nichols continued. “So I have taken it and broken it into ten episodes, and it’s under consideration right now. Who knows, people in far more powerful positions than me are deciding that. One of the tricks is, I want to shoot it like a giant film, and I’m not sure if we’ll be able to get away with that.”