While Weyland-Yutani is established as the greatest overarching evil that has plagued the Alien universe since the franchise’s very first installment, it seems as though there is a company with even more power and influence—Walmart.
Weyland-Yutani is a fictional company within Alien canon that is behind almost every atrocity that has occurred in the series especially when it comes to the Xenomorphs. In the first Alien film, the company sends a secret Synthetic with a transportation crew across the galaxy to retrieve an unknown alien life form that Weyland-Yutani hoped to use for their own personal gain, whether that be in weapons, pharmaceuticals, or anything else that could make the company money. While that seems innocent enough, the company orders the android to bring back the specimen even at the expense of the crew, which immediately shows how ruthless Weyland-Yutani really is. In the sequel film, Aliens, there is a similar situation in which Weyland-Yutani is studying Xenomorphs underneath the off-world settlement of Hadley’s Hope, happily putting hundreds of civilians in danger. With just these two examples, it is clear how amoral and greedy this company really is, but the legacy of Weyland-Yutani proves that with all the secrecy and bloodshed in pursuit of a prize it would never attain, the company would amount to nothing more than being yet another asset under arguably the most successful superstore chain on Planet Earth, Walmart.
In Alien Resurrection #1 by Jim Vance and Eduardo Risso, readers are given the story of the film brought to the page with near-perfect accuracy that also highlights certain scenes that could have been easily missed while watching the film. One scene involved Ripley 8 having a conversation with the scientists responsible for giving her life. During the conversation, Ripley says that the Queen Xenomorph the scientists helped create will breed, and the resulting Xenomorphs will kill everyone in 'the company' (aka Weyland-Yutani), Ripley’s former employer and the entity she mistakenly believes is responsible for her situation. One of the scientists then corrects Ripley 8 by telling her that they are with the United Systems Military and not Weyland-Yutani, saying, “Your former employers were bought out decades ago, by Walmart.”
The idea that a store like Walmart—one that is essentially a giant superstore grocery market designed to undercut practically all other retailers and make up for that loss with the sheer number of stores across the globe—had its hands in a company like Weyland-Yutani is absolutely hilarious. Sure, Walmart may have been passively responsible for ‘mom-and-pop’ stores having to close up shop because they couldn’t compete with the prices, but there haven’t been any reports of Walmart sending rogue androids to far-off worlds to collect the most horrifying creature imaginable for monetary gain, all the while being OK with killing its own employees and their families in the process. However, in the Alien universe, that is exactly the kind of company Walmart associates itself with after buying the villainous Weyland-Yutani.
One thing to keep in mind about this comic and the movie it is based on is that the story is set two hundred years after the events of Alien 3, which was the last sighting of a Weyland-Yutani representative. At that time, Walmart was not its parent company. It was within that two hundred year stretch of time when Walmart bought Weyland-Yutani—and with a stroke of a pen and an exchange of currency—the fictitious company’s legacy turned into a joke. Going from the most powerful company in the galaxy responsible for researching and examining aliens before anyone else, to being nothing more than an asset of a superstore chain is humiliating (and totally deserved) as Weyland-Yutani was the most evil corporation in the Alien universe before Walmart acquired it.