While promoting the Blu-ray/DVD release of The Martian, costume designer Janty Yates shared a piece of information pertaining to her next collaboration with director Ridley Scott. She told Collider that Alien: Covenant is set "10 years in the future beyond Prometheus."

The flash-forward will probably go a long way to explaining why Noomi Rapace’s Dr. Elizabeth Shaw is being relegated to just a brief appearance in the sequel. Last time we saw her, she and a body-less David (Michael Fassbender) were flying away in an alien spacecraft headed to the Engineer's homeworld.

Prometheus was set in last week of 2093, 28 years before the events that took place in the original 1979 film that starred Sigourney Weaver ('Ripley'). Now that the sequel will shorten that gap to 18 years. Synopsis: Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created in Alien with Alien: Covenant, the second chapter in a prequel trilogy that began with Prometheus -- and connects directly to Scott's 1979 seminal work of science fiction. Bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, the crew of the colony ship Covenant discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world -- whose sole inhabitant is the "synthetic" David (Michael Fassbender), survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition.