The Thing is a 2011 science fiction horror film directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., and written by Eric Heisserer. It is a prequel to the 1982 film of the same name by John Carpenter, the plot taking place immediately prior to the events of that film. It stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton who are part of a team of Norwegian and American scientists who discover an alien buried deep in the ice of Antarctica, realizing too late that it is still alive, consuming then imitating the team members.

In 1982, paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is recruited by scientists Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) and his assistant Adam Finch (Eric Christian Olsen) to join a Norwegian scientific team that has stumbled across a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship buried beneath the ice of Antarctica. They discover the frozen corpse of a creature that seems to have died in the crash 100,000 years ago.

After the creature is transported back to base in a block of ice, Dr. Sander orders them to retrieve a tissue sample, against Kate's protests. Later, while the others celebrate, co-pilot Derek (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) sees the Thing escape from the block of ice.