Weyland-Yutani

Weyland-Yutani is a fictional corporation in the motion picture Alien and its sequels, often referred to simply as "The Company". It is one of the corporations that runs the human colonies outside the solar system through the Extrasolar Colonization Administration, has a seat in the Interstellar Commerce Commission's Company Review Board, and also has a large presence on Earth.

Weyland-Yutani is consistently portrayed as exhibiting the worst aspects of corporate profiteering, and as being willing to sacrifice decency and human life in the pursuit of profit. In various portrayals of the Aliens' universe, the corporation has its hands in all aspects of space colonization and research. The corporation has consistently ordered its employees and agents to attempt to obtain living Xenomorphs so that they can be exploited as a biological weapon, of course, without regard for their lives.

Weyland-Yutani is a modern example of the longstanding trope of the evil megacorporation in science fiction.

Alien
The compound word "Weylan-Yutani" may be viewed at the upper left of the display screen during the ship awakening sequence and at the bottom left of a badly vibrating display screen during the planetoid landing sequence in Alien. It was also printed on the prop beer cans in the film, where it is partially visible in some scenes ("Original and Genuine Weylan-Yutani Aspen Beer - Extra Strong - Aspen Colorado").

Aliens
When James Cameron was assigned to write and direct the sequel, the role and significance of Weyland-Yutani increased greatly, becoming an indispensable element in Alien lore. The original Weyland-Yutani logo was an Egyptian winged-sun emblem; it was modified to its current corporo-industrial interlocked W/Y for Aliens.

It can be viewed in various places, most notably on the front of a big-wheel tricycle in a scene from the director's cut.

Alien³
In Alien³, Weyland-Yutani's name appears on screen several times written in Japanese. It appears once on a box of supplies as ウェイランド湯谷. The first six kana of this are part of the Japanese syllabary katakana which is used to spell foreign words, and here they spell weirando. The second part is the Japanese name Yutani written with two kanji, which literally means "hot-water valley" in English. The corporation's name also appears in a newspaper headline where the last four kanji read kabushiki kaisha which means "joint stock corporation."

Alien: Resurrection
By the time of Alien: Resurrection, the company no longer exists; an interstellar international political military force called "United Systems Military" now controls all the aspects of previous Weyland-Yutani involvement, including projectile firing weapons (pulse rifles and smart guns) and all other weapon development contracts.

In a deleted scene included in the director's cut of the film, as well as the novelization, one scientist remarks that Weyland-Yutani was "bought out by Wal-Mart." And in the novel Aliens: Original Sin, there is a reference made to a vehicle once made by Weyland-Yutani that now has "Wal-Mart" in its name.

Alien vs. Predator
In Alien vs. Predator, the founder of this company (then known as Weyland Industries) is shown to be Charles Bishop Weyland. He is played by Lance Henriksen, the actor that played the android Bishop in Aliens and Alien³, suggesting that the android was modelled after him. However, in the novelization of Alien³ (released before Alien vs. Predator), it is said that the Bishop android was created by a Weyland-Yutani employee named Michael Bishop.

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
In the finale of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, the man who called himself Colonel Stevens meets with a character named Yutani, offering her a Predator gun recovered from the survivors of the explosion in Gunnison, Colorado.

Other works
As an homage to the Alien movies, the Weyland-Yutani logo was used on some weapons in the TV series Firefly, and can be seen on a heads up display in that show's pilot episode. In Serenity, the Operative's claim that the Alliance was "building a better world" echoes the slogan of Weyland-Yutani, "Building Better Worlds." (The show's creator, Joss Whedon, wrote the fourth Alien film, Alien: Resurrection.)

In Whedon's series Angel, Weyland-Yutani is also named as a major client (along with Yoyodyne and News Corp) of the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart (see "Harm's Way").

The firm's name also appears on the bow of a supertanker passing under the Gibraltar Bridge, near the end of an Extreme Engineering installment, on the Discovery Channel.

German industrial music artist Wumpscut adopted the company logo as his own.

A Weyland-Yutani ship can be seen, among other crashed ships, in the Red Dwarf episode "Psirens".

In the 2005 game Predator: Concrete Jungle, a clip at the end shows the new current owner of Weyland and a Japanese man (presumably the CEO of the Yutani Corporation) celebrating the formation of their joint venture. They mention in a discussion something about Mr. Weyland's disappearance.

Origins of name
The name "Weyland-Yutani" was created by Ron Cobb, one of the designers of the Nostromo and her crew's uniforms.

One of the things I enjoyed most about Alien was its subtle satirical content. Science fiction films offer golden opportunities to throw in little scraps of information that suggest enormous changes in the world. There's a certain potency in those kinds of remarks. Weylan Yutani for instance is almost a joke, but not quite. I wanted to imply that poor old England is back on its feet and has united with the Japanese, who have taken over the building of spaceships the same way they have now with cars and supertankers. In coming up with a strange company name I thought of British Leyland and Toyota, but we couldn't use "Leyland-Toyota" in the film. Changing one letter gave me "Weylan", and "Yutani" was a Japanese neighbor of mine.

The original spelling of the Company's name was Weylan Yutani (note that there was no D in the name). At no time in Alien nor in the portfolio was the name of the Company spelled with a D. This was changed by the time of Aliens to "Weyland Yutani."