Dek of the Yautja goes through a lot throughout Predator: Badlands, all in the name of seeking validation from his father, Njohrr. This being Predator, “validation” actually means “trial by combat,” and the showdown between father and son at the end was almost more restrained than what we got on screen.
In the final cut of the film, Dek and Njohrr’s fight on Yautja Prime has them really going at it. But as Wētā’s two supervisors—Sheldon Stopsack for VFX, and Karl Rapley for animation—revealed to Polygon, that clash was originally more akin to a samurai film. “Father would turn invisible, and there’d be a quick rush as they ran toward each other,” explained Rapley. “Dek threw sand at Father, which revealed him, and then they crossed paths, like a samurai standoff, and they went to the opposite sides, and then Father’s arm fell off. So it was just a very quick exchange.”
After watching the film, director Dan Trachtenberg approached Wētā about doing a “bigger” sequence that would make it feel “more of a moment.” The Predator: Badlands stunt team came down to New Zealand and made a brand new fight sequence, so Wētā had to digitally create Yautja Prime, including the clan guards Dek disposes of and the planet’s geographical features. Using the original fight as a reference point, Rapley said the team used “sweeping camera moves” for the new sequence and created a sandstorm from scratch.
Stopsack felt the sandstorm served a “narrative point” of Dek outsmarting his father, and the idea behind it was sound. It may have been a challenge, but he said the team was “excited” to tackle it and considers it “one of the more beautiful, fun aspects [of the film]. Dan told us, ‘We don’t want to show them clearly. It wants to be muddy and a bit more gritty.’ I really admired that and resonated with it.”
With the longer fight, audiences get to see how Dek’s come into his own as a hunter, and it hopefully gets them excited about where he goes next. There’s no word yet on if we’re getting a sequel to Predator: Badlands, but at the very least, it feels like the young Yautja has endeared himself enough to hopefully pop up somewhere else.
Not every franchise can have a comeback as consistently strong as what Predator is having right now. Beginning with 2022’s Prey, the sci-fi horror series has found itself revitalized between that and this year’s Predator: Killer of Killersand Predator: Badlands, the latter of which hit theaters this past weekend.
Directing all three is Dan Trachtenberg, whose feature film debut was 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane. Along with each film giving longtime Predator fans things they’ve wanted or didn’t expect—like officially canonizing the term “Yautja” in these movies or Killer pitting the aliens against different historical factions—what binds them together are the thematic threads that run between specific pairs or the full trilogy and may define the filmmaker’s larger mission statement.
The most prevalent theme explored in Trachtenberg’s trio is masculinity. Predator has always been about this to some degree—how can it not, when it’s got that handshake and features big dudes picking fights to stroke their egos and blowing themselves up when things don’t go to plan?—and it’s all over Prey and Badlands in particular.
Badlands’ protagonist Dek is deemed a lesser Yautja owing to his small size, a status so humiliating in Yautjan culture his father Njohrr considers his son too weak to survive and wants to just kill him. Meanwhile, Prey’s Naru longs to be a hunter alongside her brother Taabe, but she’s impeded mainly by the other young men in their Comanche tribe, who try to physically or verbally prevent her from proving herself. She can’t join them because she’s a woman, but she thinks the other Comanche women’s duty of foraging and healing is a lesser act.
Prey and Badlands explore masculinity from different angles: the former posits that Naru needs to use both her hunting andforaging skills if she’s to defeat the Feral Predator, who otherwise tears through the Comanche, the French fur traders, and the local animal population with a degree of curiosity and cockiness. Yautja have always been likened to big game hunters whose advanced technology enhances the mean streak they have for killing things. But when they mess up, they really mess up; Prey’s Feral Predator almost meets his end just going up against a wolf and a bear, and there’s a similar arrogance in Dek. Despite declaring he won’t fail in killing a beast to redeem himself, he’s humbled within minutes of crash landing on Genna when the local flora steal most of his gear and nearly do him in then and there.
Of the two, Badlands’ jabs at masculinity are sharper and hit harder owing to Dek being the first Predator protagonist in these films. Like Naru, he’s positioned by Trachtenberg as an underdog, which likely wasn’t a coincidence, since the director’s mentioned almost pairing the two together. Instead, Dek’s allies are the bisected Weyland-Yutani synthetic Thia and a Gennan creature dubbed Bud. Dek takes pride in his people’s ethos of survival through strength and solidarity, which is established at the start of the film with an opening epigraph. But he also does some reconsidering when Thia asks him a simple question that challenges his whole worldview: “Who would want to survive on their own?” He eventually repays the kindness of Thia and his brother Kwei, who died protecting Dek against their father, in the film’s climax by using Genna’s wildlife to save her.
Dek on the hunt. – Fox
People are nothing without community, as emphasized in Killer of Killers and Badlands. The animated film’s three leads—Viking warrior Ursa, airman John Torres, and exiled shinobi Kenji—all fight their respective Predators with allies by their side. None of them have the honor of surviving, but they give the heroes a shot they otherwise might not have if they worked alone, and when they’re forced to fight each other for the amusement of spectating Yautja, they decide to work together to escape. Language barrier be damned, the three of them watch each other’s backs, and almost all get away, with Kenji and Torres flying off thanks to Ursa staying behind. She ends the film in suspended animation again, but Killers establishes that the Yautja capture anyone who’s killed a Predator, including Naru, but also Dutch and Harrigan (the respective leads of the first two Predator movies), so she’s not entirely on her own.
“It’s good to have friends, so quit being a jerk” is an interesting pivot for the Predator films to make, and it’s telling that all three films close on the promise of community. Those endings may tease ominous things for the characters—Kenji and Torres look well and truly screwed against a legion of Yautja ships, ditto Dek squaring off against his mother—but the underlying message Trachtenberg establishes here gives Predator some potentially fun new tools to play with as it continues gloriously doing its own thing.
James Cameron has never made a Predator movie, but he’s oddly tiptoed all around it. He, of course, directed one of the best sequels ever with Aliens, a franchise that has been connected to Predator for a while. With The Terminator, he helped make Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in the first Predator, one of the biggest stars ever. And, while Predator: Badlands was filming in New Zealand, Cameron was also in the country making his own Disney creature movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash. So when Cameron gets thanked in the credits of this week’s Predator: Badlands, it isn’t exactly a surprise, but the truth of it goes much deeper than all of that.
Speaking to io9 in Los Angeles this week, Badlands director Dan Trachtenberg explained why he thanked Cameron in the credits. “I consider myself very lucky that we were making movies at the same company,” Trachtenberg said. “We collaborate with the same executives, and he saw Prey and loved it. So when we were heading down to New Zealand to shoot, he invited me down to Wellington to hang out on [the Avatar 3] set and in his edit bay. And I divulged all my anxiety about making this movie and the methodology that we were doing, which was going to be very new for the franchise and certainly very new to me.”
Trachtenberg is primarily referring to the fact that Badlands flips the Predator franchise on its head by making a Yautja, the killer species at the center of the franchise, a hero. He is probably also referring to the fact that the character’s face was completely created using CGI based on the facial expressions of its actor, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi. It’s a process Cameron is very well-versed in.
“Then we reconvened for dinner, and we drove separately,” Trachtenberg continues. “And when he sat down, he said, ‘I was thinking about what you’re doing on the way over here and I think it’s going to work.’ And that was insane. He put so much wind in my sails to bring back up to Auckland and tell the whole crew.”
But that encouragement wasn’t the only reason Trachtenberg decided to thank Cameron in the credits. After filming ended, he turned to the Oscar-winning director one more time.
“Then, just a few months ago, we had a cut movie of the movie that was almost done, not quite, and I wanted to get his input before we put the finishing touches on,” Trachtenberg said. “And he wrote a note back that said, ‘I have to be honest, when I first heard about what you’re doing, I didn’t think it was going to work, but holy crap, it really worked.’ I don’t know if he didn’t remember the first thing or if he just knows exactly what someone in my shoes needs to hear when they hear it. So it was just amazing.”
We think lots of people are going to have Cameron’s reaction to Predator: Badlands when it hits theaters later this week. Check back for more from Trachtenberg and on the film soon.
Recently Predator: Badlands director Dan Trachtenberg touched on how, if at all, the other projects in development while he was making his second installment within the 20th Century Studios wheelhouse affected his work. “There was a lot going on while we were making this movie. Romulus was not yet out, and I hadn’t seen it yet. And Alien Earth, I was aware of happening, but not sure where that was [going to] end up. So we decided to set ourselves well into the future,” he told IGN.
In Badlands, Elle Fanning’s Thia is indeed a Weyland-Yutani synth from the Alien franchise’s evil corporation, but the far-future setting gave Trachtenberg room to play in his own sandbox. “So all the stuff that has happened would have happened before our movie. We’re not trying to squeeze [it] in,” he explained. “[I am] also cognizant of how, in this day and age, with all the media that we have, some of it can feel like homework. And you’re going to have to remind yourself, where in a timeline does this sit between this movie and that movie? And I really do not want that to be the case with Badlands.”
And that’s such a relief if, like myself, you were thinking, “Geez, do I have to watch Alien: Romulus and all of Alien: Earth before Predator: Badlands?” to find out that’s not the case at all. But obviously if you want to do all that, go for it. Just know they’re not movies or shows set up solely with the intention to build bridges to lead up to any sort of crossover event. Just enjoy the darn Xenomorphs wreaking havoc and that Predator on the hunt.
Shane Black has brought a lot of entertainment to Hollywood over the years, sometimes as an actor (he played Hawkins in 1987’s Predator), but mostly as a filmmaker. He created the Lethal Weapon series, wrote The Monster Squad and The Long Kiss Good-Night, co-wrote and directed Iron Man 3, and more.
But 2018’s The Predator, which he co-wrote and directed, misfired both in front of and behind the camera. It was especially disappointing for fans given his long history with the franchise.
Black aims to bounce back from The Predator with his current release, a thriller called Play Dirty. But he acknowledges that Dan Trachtenberg, the director who took up Predator after The Predator—and is now steering the entire franchise, with animated film Predator: Killer of Killers and Predator: Badlands releasing this year—deserves a lot of credit.
“Dan Trachtenberg saved that franchise,” Black told the Hollywood Reporter. “His work is impeccable. I saw Prey, and all I could do was say, ‘Sir, my hat’s off.’ That was a really great mythic take. I feel like an audience member now, and I’m just happy to see whatever he does. So, yeah, I’m happy that the franchise is still humming, as you say, and he’s the right shepherd for it, at least for now.”
After taking the franchise into the past with the badass 2022 prequel Prey, director Dan Trachtenberg is returning with a new Predator sequel—and this time, we’re going (back) to the future.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Trachtenberg has signed on to direct Badlands, a new installment in the Predator franchise. Trachtenberg developed the story with Patrick Aison, who wrote the screenplay for both Prey and the upcoming Badlands. Unlike Prey, which was set in the 18th century and centered on a Comanche woman (Amber Midthunder) going toe-to-toe with a Predator, Badlands will be set “sometime in the future.” Little else is known about the plot, though THR notes that Badlands will also feature a female protagonist—and honestly, I wouldn’t mind if Trachtenberg found a way to cast Midthunder again.
The series kicked off in 1987 with the release of Predator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and the late Carl Weathers. Shane Black, who would go on to write and direct Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys, had a small supporting role in Predator and famously punched up the script on set, though his work was uncredited. John McTiernan directed the 1987 film, which was followed by 1990’s Predator 2, starring Danny Glover. The franchise lay dormant until 2010’s Predators, directed by Nimród Antal and produced by Robert Rodriguez. Black returned to the series for 2018’s The Predator, which he directed and co-wrote with Fred Dekker. Reports of studio interference were validated by the finished product—an underwhelming mess that lacked Black’s usual sensibilities.
Prey was a huge success when it was released on Hulu in 2022. The film was originally slated for a theatrical release, but under 20th Century Studios’ previous output deal, Prey would’ve ended up on HBO after its theatrical run. Having just acquired 20th Century, Disney decided to circumvent that release strategy by dropping Prey on Hulu. Now, according to THR, 20th Century is developing a new series of Predator films based on the success of Prey.
Badlands does not yet have a release date, but it seems likely that it could hit theaters as soon as 2025.
Great news for fans of the Predator franchise, particularly standalone prequel entry Prey: the director of that 2022 film, Dan Trachtenberg (who also made 10 Cloverfield Lane), is returning to the universe. While Prey 2 still might happen, that’s not what this new project is; rather, it’s another standlone titled Badlands.
As Deadline reports, Badlands is a direct result of Prey’s success; despite being a straight-to-Hulu release in a time when theaters where still reopening after the height of the pandemic, it was a critical and audience smash. There’s no word yet if Badlands will get a theatrical release, but it seems like a good possibility; the trade writes that the project is “high prority” for 20th Century, with the lead role currently being cast and shooting due to start later in 2024.
There are no specific plot details yet, but we can absolutely assume the story will involve an alien hunter coming to Earth with all manner of ridiculous weaponry, hoping to add more victims to their kill count. Purely speculating here, but the title Badlands evokes the Wild West era; if Trachtenberg is going for another period piece in the vein of Prey, perhaps we’ll see some sharpshooting outlaws in the mix.
Are you excited for a new Predator movie that follows Prey’s blueprint for success? Let us know in the comments below.
