Alien: Covenant follows a group of 14 colonists and their android, Walter, who travel to a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy to form a human settlement. The Last Supper shows the crew gathering for a final meal before entering cryosleep—a mirrored homage to the original film's dinner scene.

The prologue film contains a few key nods to the original 1979 film while leaning into the rich emotional territory implied by a colonization mission led by couples. We wanted to showcase the dynamics of their relationships and touch on themes of love, jealousy and ego to put their humanity on display, both good and bad. It was also important for us to reveal the franchise’s first same-sex couple in way that didn’t politicize or minimize their inclusion.

We curated a two-week stream of content to grab the attention of fans, press and general moviegoers. The entire experience was anchored around the prologue and culminated with the trailer.

We began by revealing the first official photo of the full cast, which also confirmed James Franco’s involvement in the film and racked up headlines. From there, we amplified social awareness by partnering with Instagram to help debut their new album feature and shared exclusive images from the film while teasing the upcoming prologue.

Next, we used the Last Supper’s launch to target core sci-fi fans and debuted a teaser during FX’s Legion. This directed fans online to watch the short film. Over the next week we leveraged the buzz around the prologue to debut the first trailer.

Thanks to our multi-audience presence across television, digital social and publishing, we were able to reach tens of millions of viewers.

The Last Supper launch was a complete success. In terms of reach, the video received more than 14 millions views across Facebook, YouTube, and other digital platforms. It achieved status as the #1 trending video on both YouTube and Reddit Movies.

The engagement was off the charts. Despite being nearly 5-minutes long, it garnered a 13% Facebook completion rate compared to a 9.3% trailer benchmark. On YouTube, it scored a whopping 65% retention rate. The prologue even received 9% more engagement than December’s Alien: Covenant teaser trailer—a promising statistic for this sort of approach to story-driven marketing, and people took notice.

The spot was covered by more than 125 press outlets. Many publications and blogs echoed our core assumptions and ideas that were baked into the piece and the headlines perfectly encapsulated exactly what we wanted to achieve with our creative.