Alien vs. Predator anime series based on the original Dark Horse Comics waiting at Disney!

A 10 episode Alien vs. Predator anime was completed for Netflix and currently resides hidden away at Disney with no real indication of ever being released... at the moment. Back in March of 2020, we learned that an Alien vs. Predator anime series was created before 20th Century Fox was bought out by Disney and that the series remained indefinitely shelved. More recent developments have revealed that the series was inspired and originally based on the original Dark Horse Comics AvP series!

The new information comes courtesy of Perfect Organism Podcast, who recently had the opportunity to interview 20th Century Fox's Josh Izzo, to which he revealed:

One thing that did not happen during Alien Day in 2016 was – there is sitting at Disney now, at 20th [Studios], 10 episodes of a fully completed Alien vs. Predator anime series that I produced. It’s done. It’s in the can. It’s mixed, it’s finished. It was produced and story cracked by Eric Calderon and Dave Baker. Two unbelievably crazy talented guys. Dave Bixler was head of Home Entertainment at the time – from a creative perspective – and he championed this for me.

I was and I still remain to this day, good friends [with] – and I consider [him] a mentor – Sam Register. Sam Register is the head of all WB animation and Sam was in charge of all of the direct to DVD adaptations of the DC Comics programs. So, you know, Kingdom Come, Gotham By Gaslight, First Flight, the Wonder Woman one…all the direct to DVD at Warner Brothers animation came out of Sam’s division and I thought those were amazing. I was like this right here this is what’s up. This is a great business model. In a previous life, when I worked at Hasbro, I did a direct to DVD Action Man program and that also worked too, so I was like “that’s cool we can do this” and I have a budget. And it’s not super expensive. You could do this on the cheap.

So while I was setting up Alien Day and starting to lay the pieces in place I went to the head of our division. His name was Jeffrey Godsick, he ran consumer products at the time and I said “hey listen, I want to pitch this idea of a direct to DVD Alien and/or Alien/Predator and/or Predator animation that we the consumer products division can sell against. Let us be the masters of our own destiny rather than waiting for theatrical whenever a movie decides to come out” because at this time Covenant was still nascent and The Predator had not happened yet so the brands weren’t doing anything at the moment. It was still open season for our sci-fi brands so he was like “yeah, it’s a great idea, go.”

So I went to Home Entertainment, [to] the woman who was in charge of marketing, her name was Rio Cyrus, [an] absolute genius, and [to head of] production Dave Bixler. I pitched them and I said “we own nearly 30 years of comic book content of Alien and Predator and AvP. No rights, no strings. Dark Horse did an amazing job but it’s all Circle C 20th Century Fox. It’s ours to do with as we please. Why don’t we adapt the original AvP comic book series with Machiko and Broken Tusk? Let’s just do that. Here’s your storyboard. Here, it’s done, it’s finished. Like just take this and go make that into an animated movie, then we can use that as a springboard for consumer products.”

Everyone’s like “that’s a pretty cool idea. Let’s run the numbers.” We all ran the numbers and they were like “yeah this could work. Neat, let’s try it.” So they went out and they found…I believe it was – it wasn’t Gonzo – I have to think of the name of the production house but it was this amazing production house in Japan. They’d actually done some work for Studio Ghibli and some other stuff but they bid it out, they found this company that wanted to do it.

But the director who they brought on board said “this is cool and I’m down…” and he happened to be a really good director. He had worked on a Halo piece, it was a Halo kind of like Animatrix series (Josh is talking about Halo Legends). So he’d done that, but he also did the Captain Harlock movie. It was beautiful. He goes “I have another idea. Can I do my own thing?” He pitches us a whole new story, a brand new story. And so myself, as kind of Keeper of the Canon, plus we bring in Dave Baker and Eric Calderon…we bring them in as Western animation consultants and producers. We all sit down and we craft the story and we crack the idea and we find a place within our established canon. I put it way deep future,  post-AvP, post-Alien 4.

It’s deep future stuff, where we said “this won’t compete with anything that’s happening in our core timeline.” So if you ever want to do another movie or tell any of the stories on Earth, we’re all square. It won’t overlap, nothing will happen, Finally we all come to an agreement. We green light it and we go. We’re making 10 episodes. It was going to be released as three direct to DVD and/or streaming movies here in the West. 10 episodes on Japan television.

Unfortunately, there is no current plans of this series ever seeing the light of day - but perhaps if news of its existence sparks enough interest, Disney might consider releasing it one day.

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