Alien: Romulus Ending Explained - A New Future for the Alien Series?

This doesn't have to be hard, or scary! You want to know if there are any post- or mid-credits scenes in Alien: Romulus. The answer is no, there's nothing during the credits or after the credits are finished rolling.

Warning: Full spoilers follow for Alien: Romulus.

The first Alien movie made waves as a terrifying sci-fi horror that also deftly handled class, gender, and introduced one of the defining movie monsters of our time in the Xenomorph. Forty-five years later and Don't Breathe director Fede Álvarez has brought the nightmarish H.R. Giger creation back to life in Alien: Romulus, a delightfully grubby and gruesome entry to the canon set between Ridley Scott's original classic and James Cameron's beloved action-heavy sequel Aliens.

Alien: Romulus follows a group of young Weyland-Yutani workers desperate to escape from the mining colony Jackson's Star where they've worked away their young lives. The discovery of an abandoned space station offers up the potential of a new life, but soon Rain (Cailee Spaeny), her android “brother” Andy (David Jonsson), her ex Tyler (Archie Renaux), his sister Kay (Isabella Mercad), and their friends Navarro (Aileen Wu) and Bjorn (Spike Fearn) find themselves trapped on the station with numerous Facehuggers, Xenomorphs, and other malicious foes. It's a wickedly scary romp through space that our reviewer Tom Jorgenson gave an 8 out of 10. So if you've already ventured into space with the crew of incredibly good-looking young scavengers and have questions about the ninth movie in the Alien franchise, like a helpful android, we're here!

Alien: Romulus Ending Explained

As the third act comes to its peak, it seems like Rain, Kay, and Andy are going to make it off the Romulus station safely. It's a fake-out that works well to lure the audience into a false sense of security, though if you're an Alien fan you likely will have guessed a happy ending wasn't on the cards.

After Kay makes the mistake of injecting herself with the miracle alien goo that the android Rook has been trying to transport back to the colony, she goes into uber-birth and disrupts the cryostasis Rain was hoping would save her life. In a grotesque body horror moment, Kay gives bloody, gruesome birth to an alien pod, soon revealing that her gestating baby has been mutated by the alien goo into a monstrous new form. It emerges almost fully grown as a hybrid human-Xenomorph that looks far more like the franchise's godlike creatures the Engineers than your average person.

With Kay incapacitated and likely dead, Rain and Andy are left to survive. While a ticking clock counts down the minutes until the space station crashes into the rings of the colony, the pair must battle the frightening Engineer-Xeno-Whatever. Andy is sliced and diced and badly damaged, and Rain battles the Offspring to the finish – finally getting it sucked (blown?) into space thorugh the ship's cargo bay.

Taking the damaged android body of her adopted brother Andy with her to the cryopods onboard their ship, Rain promises to fix him before setting off – and leaving a classic Alien franchise ship's log for someone to find, stating that she doesn't know if she'll even get to the planet Yvaga, where she and her friends were originally planning to head to at the start of the film.

The end of Alien: Romulus pays homage to multiple moments from the franchise, the most obvious being the fact that motherhood and pregnancy have always been key themes in the franchise, so making Kay give birth to a new creature makes a lot of sense. That sequence is also similar to Prometheus' alien implantation and abortion, as well as a call-back to Alien: Resurrection when the Alien Queen gives birth to a hybrid thanks to the fact that her DNA was contaminated with that of the Ripley clone at the center of that '90s sci-fi flick. And just like Ripley did in the original Alien movie, Rain gets rid of her Xenomorph problem by ejecting it from the ship.

Does Alien: Romulus Have a Post-Credits Scene?

Alas, no. If you're a fan of the mid-credits or post-credits stinger tradition, then you'll be disappointed to know that Alien: Romulus avoids that trend. But the good news is that's not to say there aren't exciting Easter eggs and lore dumps aplenty during its runtime.

How Does Alien: Romulus Connect to the Other Alien Films?

Aside from the fact that the movie is set directly between the first two films in the series, Alien: Romulus is filled with both obvious narrative and subtle textual connections and call-backs to the franchise. The biggest reveal here is that the Xenomorph from Ridley Scott's original film seemingly survived being shot into space by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). Years later the Weyland-Yutani corporation managed to find the Alien and experimented on it, leading to the death of the space station’s entire crew and lots of aliens – including walls of Facehuggers. We also got a deep-cut nod to that specific Xenomorph's designation, XX121, which has appeared in both the Alien novels and a 2016 collectible art book by S.D. Perry called Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report.

We also get a glimpse of the life-creating alien goo from Prometheus, which here is explained by Rook who says that the explorers from the Prometheus mission had found it, though it cost all the inhabitants of the Romulus space station their lives. (Rook, of course, is another version of the android Ash, who was played by the late Ian Holm in the 1979 original film and is recreated here through digital trickery.) Another big nod to the previous films is Kay's gross-out child, which is referred to as the “Offspring” in the film’s production notes and which acts as a clear nod to the Xenomorph known as the Newborn from 1997's Alien: Resurrection. While the Newborn was part human, it still looked more Xenomorph than the Offspring, which is a terrifying Xeno-Human hybrid (which seems to reach adulthood almost immediately). Former basketball player Robert Bobroczkyi plays the Offpsring in Romulus.

Álvarez also stocked the film with plenty of blink and you'll miss it nods and Easter eggs, like a proto-version of the pulse guns used by the Colonial Marines in Aliens and also the name-drop to that squadron which gave the 2013 video game its name. Speaking of video games, we also get a couple of different Alien: Isolation bits here, including a really rad one calling back to the games’ "save" mechanism that Álvarez told GamesRadar about.

“The movie is set up in a way [that] every time something bad is about to happen, you will see a phone,” the director said. “In the game, every time you knew there’s a phone you’d go, ‘Fuck, I’m about to go into some bad set-piece.’ It’s the same thing here. You’ll see they’re planted strategically throughout the film. When you see the phone, it’s like: brace for impact.”

Could Alien: Romulus Set up a Sequel or Spin-Off?

Seeing as the film takes place between Alien and Aliens, it technically leads into the latter. But as we don't know Rain or Andy's fates, it also offers up a route to follow their story on. (It also takes place some 37 years before Aliens, so there’s plenty of time to fill things in there.) That would be an interesting diversion, especially as it could also explore the nature of the mysterious goo that we first saw in Scott's Prometheus and its follow-up, Alien: Covenant, and which created the nightmare adult-baby Xenomorph Álvarez introduced here. While there's no confirmed sequel or continuation yet, the positive reviews, relatively low budget, and currently impressive-looking box office mean that Alien: Romulus 2 definitely could happen, especially as Disney ventures further into R-rated entertainment.

What did you think of Alien: Romulus? Let’s discuss in the comments!

Note: This story originally ran on 8/15/24 without spoilers. It was updated on 8/16/24.