Where the Alien storyline can go after Alien: Romulus (spoilers)

Alien: Romulus hatches a plethora of xenomorph-centric horror as it recaps the events that went down between the masterpieces Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). You can enjoy the movie for £4 as part of National Cinema Day on August 31st, and we're already thinking about the next possible movie in the saga.

Given Alien: Romulus has proved to be a big box office hit, it's highly likely we'll get another chapter in the terrifying Alien franchise. Here are four possible scenarios that could play out.

Rain and Andy divert to Origae 6 and meet David

Alien: Romulus ends with Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her android surrogate sibling Andy (David Jonsson) heading for the planet Yvaga. This is where they were intending to go all along – it's just they were compelled to divert to the Romulus space station and pick up the cryo-stasis chambers to make the journey possible. Several run-ins with the xenomorphs later and the two characters end up being the only survivors.

Yvaga is positioned as the promised land, an escape from the grim industrial life Rain and Andy have been living at the colony outpost Jackson's Star. But what if they don't get there? What if they instead end up on the planet Origae 6, the planet where rogue sociopathic android David (Michael Fassbender), introduced in Prometheus (2012), planned to deposit the facehugger embryos at the end of Alien: Covenant?

It would be a neat way of re-introducing Fassbender to the series. His performance as the ruthless, free-thinking David, not to mention David's more advanced doppelganger Walter in Covenant, is one of the franchise's highlights. It would also allow prospective filmmakers to wrap up those nagging story threads regarding the engineers and human evolution that were left hanging at the end of the Ridley Scott-directed prequel film.

The story could instead divert to LV-426

Alien: Romulus begins 20 years after the events of Alien, so it makes sense that any sequel will take place closer to the events of Aliens (1986). The sequel could potentially focus on the establishment of the human colony on LV-426, and the nefarious Weyland-Yutani machinations that ultimately cause said colonists to be impregnated with the xenomorph eggs.

We see this briefly in James Cameron's extended cut of Aliens. We see the father of Newt (Carrie Henn) with a facehugger attached to him but the rest of the horror that afflicts the colonists is left unseen, instead cutting back to the haunted Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) several weeks later. Maybe there's greater mileage to turn the LV-426 tragedy into its own story.

Rain and Andy could run into Amanda Ripley

The events of the acclaimed PlayStation game Alien: Isolation broadly overlap with those of Alien: Romulus and its hypothetical sequels. (Recap the Alien timeline to find out more.) If Rain and Andy are on their to Yvaga, what's to say they don't cross paths with Ripley's grown-up daughter, Amanda? She's the central protagonist in the memorably petrifying FPS game and has grown up in her mother's absence while the latter drifted in hypersleep between the events of Alien and Aliens. The game concludes with Amanda cast adrift in space, having detonated the Sevastopol space station to destroy the rampaging xenomorphs.

Alien: Romulus director Fede Alvarez is a confessed fan of the game and there are sly visual Easter Eggs in Alien: Romulus that allude to key objects in the game itself. Maybe the Alien: Romulus sequel can retcon the end of the game and contrive that Rain and Andy are the unseen individuals saving Amanda Ripley from drifting in deep space?

We could meet the colonial marines on their initial 'bug hunt'

In Aliens, the sardonic and ill-prepared colonial marines, specifically the late Bill Paxton's memorably goofy Pvt. Hudson, disparage their LV-426 mission as possibly "Another bug hunt". This implies that they've been sent on a xenomorph goose chase before, although judging from their reactions when landing on LV-426 and discovering the cocooned colonists, they've never encountered the horrific creatures before.

Could the Alien: Romulus sequel act as an in-between-quel that focuses on this earlier mission? Evidently, there's no chance of Paxton returning (unless they do an Ian Holm/Rook-style CG approximation of his likeness) and the rest of the Aliens cast are now too old to convincingly portray the characters' younger selves. It might be more sensible to instead focus on a new group of marines who undertook the mission while Ripley was still in hypersleep.