Forget 'The Dog Stars' — 'Alien: Covenant' Is Staging Ridley Scott's Streaming Comeback

Ridley Scott is having a strange year. His latest film, The Dog Stars — his first new sci-fi epic in nearly a decade, starring Josh Brolin, Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley — has grossed roughly $15 million domestically against a reported budget of around $100 million, making it one of the lowest-grossing films of his career. But while theaters rejected the new Scott, streaming is embracing the old one. His most divisive sci-fi film is staging a genuine comeback on Vudu, and it is the redemption story the director desperately needed.

Alien: Covenant, Scott's 2017 return to the xenomorph saga, split audiences down the middle when it released — too philosophical for horror fans, too brutal for the Prometheus crowd. Nearly a decade later, the film is finding its second life. It is a familiar Scott pattern: the director who has seen Alien, Blade Runner and Kingdom of Heaven all grow from theatrical disappointments into canonized classics is watching it happen again, this time with a prequel many wrote off.

Scott's franchises keep finding new life

Covenant is not the only Scott-adjacent title climbing the charts. Blade Runner 2049 — the 2017 sequel Scott executive-produced, directed by Denis Villeneuve — has spent much of this year inside streaming top 10s across dozens of countries, riding a wave of renewed interest ahead of Prime Video's Blade Runner 2099, the franchise's first television series, arriving November 25 with Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer leading the cast.

And Scott is not done with his own universes. He recently announced he is developing a new Alien film built around Michael Fassbender's David — the android at the center of Prometheus and Covenant — while continuing to shepherd Blade Runner 2099 as a producer. At 88, the director is effectively running both of his signature franchises from behind the camera, developing new chapters while his older ones keep winning new audiences.

The lesson of the comeback

There is an irony in all of this. The Dog Stars was supposed to be Scott's return to the genre that made him a legend; instead, it is a film from nine years ago doing the heavy lifting. But that has always been the Ridley Scott story — a director whose movies are rarely judged correctly on opening weekend. Theaters may have moved on from The Dog Stars, but on streaming, Scott's filmography is doing what it has always done: getting better with time.