Dan Trachtenberg, who has spent the last several years reviving and steering the Predator franchise for 20th Century Studios, is planting his flag at Paramount Pictures.
The filmmaker has signed a three-year first-look directing and producing deal with the studio. He will develop, direct and produce feature projects with his producing partner, Ben Rosenblatt.
The deal marks a return to the Melrose lot for Trachtenberg, who made his feature debut with 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane for Paramount. And it’s the latest big-name filmmaker deal for the David Ellison-owned Paramount, which is headed by co-chairs Josh Greenstein and Dana Goldberg.
“As a kid I remember seeing the Paramount logo and dreaming of the epic adventure that would follow,” said Trachtenberg in a statement. “Now to have the opportunity to bring new huge and emotional stories to giant screens is a literally a dream come true. Ben and I cannot wait to join Dana, Josh, Don, and the entire Paramount team in pursuing our shared vision of making Paramount once again the apex of cinema.”
Paramount, since being acquired last summer, has brought filmmakers and producers such as the Duffer Brothers (Stranger Things), Jon M. Chu (Wicked), James Mangold (A Complete Unknown), Issa Rae (Insecure) and JD Lifshitz and Raphael Marguelies (Barbarian) into the fold as its stocks up with cupboard with talent.
Stated Greenstein and Goldberg: “Dan has an extraordinary ability to deliver films that are both daring and deeply entertaining. He has a rare instinct for tension, scale, and storytelling that connects with audiences worldwide. We’re excited to welcome him to the studio.”
Trachtenberg is coming off the success of Predator: Badlands, the third of his Predator features. Released in November, Badlands became the highest-grossing entry in the franchise’s 38-year history, earning $184.5 million worldwide and surpassing the previous franchise record holder, 2004’s Alien vs. Predator ($177.4 million).
That came on the heels of his animated feature Predator: Killer of Killers, which was released in June on Hulu. He first took on Predator with Prey, the 2022 movie that revitalized the franchise by taking it into the colonial West. The movie earned Trachtenberg two Emmy nominations, including outstanding directing for a limited series anthology or movie and outstanding writing for a limited series anthology or movie.
Rosenblatt was a producer on the Snowpiercer and Ripley series, in addition to producing Trachtenberg’s Predator franchise films.
Trachtenberg, who also directed the pilot for Amazon series The Boys, is repped by CAA, Untitled and Johnson Shapiro.
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.
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.”
One of the worst years for cancellations, cuts, and closures in the history of the video game industry has just claimed its next victims, including Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks. Developers and fans alike are in disbelief. “Great teams are sunsetting before our eyes again, and it’s a fucking gut stab,” wrote Dinga Bakaba, director at Arkane Austin sister-studio, Arkane Lyon.
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Set up in 2006, Arkane Austin helped develop the acclaimed 2012 whale-oil-punk immersive sim Dishonored, before leading development on 2017’s haunting sci-fi shooter Prey. Tango Gameworks, meanwhile, was founded in 2010 and is best known for making the Evil Within series of survival horrorgames, before bestowing a collective breath of fresh air on the video game industry last year with the colorful rhythm hack and slash platformer Hi-Fi Rush. Microsoft shut down both studios today, as well as other Bethesda subsidiaries Roundhouse Games and Alpha Dog Games, citing a need to focus on “high-impact” “priority games.”
“This is absolutely terrible,” tweeted Bakaba, co-creative director at the remaining Arkane studio, in the wake of the news. “Permission to be human: to any executive reading this, friendly reminder that video games are an entertainment/cultural industry, and your business as a corporation is to take care of your artists/entertainers and help them create value for you.”
The Deathloop co-director at the Microsoft-owned studio continued:
Don’t throw us into gold fever gambits, don’t use us as strawmen for miscalculations/blind spots, don’t make our work environments darwinist jungles. You say we make you proud when we make a good game. Make us proud when times are tough. We know you can, we seen it before.
For now, great teams are sunsetting before our eyes again, and it’s a fucking gut stab. Lyon is safe, but please be tactful and discerning about all this, and respect affected folks’ voice and leave it room to be heard, it’s their story to tell, their feelings to express.
Inside baseball, but if I read ‘immersive sim curse’ from the community, especially from a fellow dev, I swear to God… Please, let’s talk about the *real* challenges instead of rehashing irrational anxieties of the past. Even more inside baseball, but with a very, very wide range, as a wise and sorely missed man said: “Please Stop.”
Harvey Smith, co-director on Redfall at Arkane Austin, called today’s new “terrible,” adding that the team there had been through a lot together. Bloomberg previously reported that the vampire shooter’s troubled development grew out of a push by top Bethesda leadership to make a live-service game, a decision that ultimately led to sky-high attrition and multiple delays. “Your talent will lift you up, and I will do anything I can to help,” tweeted Smith. John Johanas, game director at Tango Gameworks, was also at a loss. “So this is how it ends…” he wrote. “Unfortunately I don’t quite have the words…But at least thank you to everyone who supported us.”
Back when Microsoft acquired Bethesda in 2021, its burgeoning Game Pass model seemed like a potentially great fit for Arkane Studios, whose creatively ambitious projects didn’t always seem to find the audiences they deserved. If Bethesda would never greenlight a Prey 2, maybe a deep-pocketed tech giant would see it as as a worthwhile addition to its Netflix-like subscription gaming library. If nothing else, the newly acquired teams would have no shortage of other holes to fill in Xbox’s struggling first-party lineup.
Adam Boyes, co-CEO at Iron Galaxy Studios, juxtaposed today’s carnage with Microsoft’s bottom line in a tweet screencapping the company’s recently announced quarterly profits of roughly $20 billion. “It hurts dude… it hurts,” wrote back Rich Lambert, head of ZeniMax Online Studios. “Angry. Frustrated. Shocked. Furious. Speechless. Dumbfounded. Perplexed,” wrote Alistair Hatch, another long-time veteran of Bethesda. “I have so much love for the studios affected. The people that made those teams were incredible, hard working, dedicated, and talented.”
People from other Microsoft-owned studios and outside the company have also been horrified by the news. “We took a lot of inspiration from both Evil Within and Evil Within 2 when developing Alan Wake 2,” tweeted Remedy Entertainment game director Kyle Rowley. “They are both excellent horror games and I’m very sad we will not get to see a continuation of the franchise from Tango Gameworks. “Why do I still do this?” tweeted Obsidian Entertainment communications director Mikey Dowling.
“Arkane did solid work and had a highly talented and motivated staff,” Mike Wikan, the former Retro Studios developer who led design on Metroid Prime, wrote on LinkedIn. “Companies need to understand that burning your Creative Production Studios to the ground is NOT the path to profitability.”
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.
After months of silence, vampire shooter Redfall is receiving its biggest update yet following a disastrous launch back in May. The second big patch will add the Game Pass multiplayer game’s long-awaited 60 frames-per-second mode on Xbox Series X/S, as well as a host of gameplay improvements and bug fixes.
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“Today’s update brings Performance Mode to Xbox Series X/S, stealth takedowns, a bevy of new controller settings, and a lot more changes to Redfall,” the development team wrote on Bethesda’s website. While the 60fps mode is the biggest addition, a raft of accessibility features and improvements to stealth gameplay and aiming sensitivity are also welcome changes. Whether it’s enough to begin addressing some of the deeper disappointment around Redfall’s lackluster enemy encounters and unfulfilling progression system remains to be seen.
Redfall was panned by many critics and players when it launched earlier this year. Expected to be the first-party blockbuster that would end Microsoft’s drought of console exclusives, it instead failed to live up to the months of marketing hype that preceded it. In addition to bugs, performance issues, and complaints about the core gameplay loop, it also launched on the “next-gen” Xbox Series X/S with a “next-gen” price tag of $70 but without the 60fps performance option that players on PC would have access to.
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer apologized for the situation at the time, but a report by Bloomberg later revealed other issues underlying the game’s rough development. Made by Arkane, best known for immersive sims like Prey and Dishonored, Redfall was instead an online multiplayer game that at one point was planned to include microtransactions as part of a push by parent company ZeniMax into live-service monetization. While those features were stripped out, a lack of development resources and constant turnover reportedly made it hard for the studio to deliver on Redfall’s confusing blend of genres and gameplay mechanics.
Recently, Bethesda marketing head Pete Hines said in an interview that despite the harsh reception, Redfall wouldn’t be abandoned. Instead, he expected new players joining Game Pass a decade from now to give the game a shot and enjoy it thanks to ongoing post-launch support. With Cyberpunk 2077‘s recent 2.0 victory lap after a botched release, many are wondering if Redfall can pull of something similar, or if Microsoft will pour the money into it required to make that happen.
If it does, it will still have a big uphill battle to fight. The game only has a few dozen players on Steam at any given moment. Still, Redfall’s second update is a start.
Redfall, a vampire shooter out this week on Xbox and PC, was developed by Arkane Studios, the same team behind classics like Dishonored and Prey. It’s one of Microsoft’s first-party exclusives for 2023, a big release for the company’s Game Pass subscription service. And by most accounts, it sucks.
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We’re currently playing the game together for our own impressions, which will be published soon, but in the meantime—because I find the reception so extraordinary given the scale (and price) of the release—I thought I’d roundup some of the impressions and review pieces out there from outlets who managed to receive code ahead of Redfall’s release (we, obviously, did not), or have been updating a review-in-progress piece as they go along.
Ultimately, Redfall is a game that should not have been released yet. Its litany of bugs hampers the gameplay loop of exploring its world with friends, and that loop itself feels compromised by elements that are poorly executed and ill-suited to the team implementing them. I can’t pretend to know whether Arkane chose to make a loot-shooter or was assigned to make a loot-shooter, but I can tell you what it feels like: one of the best game studios in the world suddenly made toothless.
Redfall is ultimately not up to Arkane’s usual standards. It feels rushed, unfinished, and unsatisfying to play. Single-player is hampered by a squad-based open-world shooter structure, multiplayer held back by odd decisions, and decent gunplay is marred by uninspiring mission structures. It’s a confusing game, full of contradictions, and the result is unfulfilling.
With Redfall arriving at IGN just a couple of days ahead of its official release date we haven’t had enough time to complete a final review yet – certainly not without becoming a nocturnal monster myself and staying awake all weekend. However, after several sessions – solo, co-op with a friend, and also in a group of three – I must admit I’m thoroughly underwhelmed by Redfall’s vanilla missions and lifeless world, and very disappointed at its lengthy list of display issues and bugs.
Redfall fails to compel on nearly every level, not just in its uninteresting story, but also its all-too-familiar gameplay. Not only does Redfall feel like a game stuck in yesteryear, even its performance finds a way to disappoint.
Eurogamer’s early impressions are actually quite optimistic, writer Christian Donlan preferring to reserve final judgement until the game was done, but I thought his anecdote at the end here was a pretty good summary of the game’s visuals:
So how is it ugly? It’s technical stuff, I think, and while I’ll leave that to Digital Foundry I’ll say that the edges – technical term – are a little rough. Textures sometimes pop in late or not at all, so those beautiful trees are always bursting into fiery life a little too close by, and at one point the classic immersive sim storytelling graffiti on a wall was weirdly pixellated. Character models are still and oddly lit. I should add here, I’m trying to be objective, which is always a mistake. I think the patchy textures – yes, I’m really about to say this – gives the town a slightly impressionist feel. The waxy characters are wonderfully waxy, the kind of things you might meet on a trip through a haunted Hall of Presidents. Even so, there’s no ducking the fact that my wife came into the room when I was playing, looked at the screen in horror and said, “Jesus! What happened to Fortnite?”
I should note not all reviews and impressions pieces are so down! If you head over to Metacritic you’ll find some outlets—many of which I’ve literally never heard of, but still—have given the game positive scores, like We Got This Covered, who rated it 4.5 stars out of 5, saying:
With rich, beautiful open worlds, a multitude of weapons, and a wide variety of enemies to square off against, Redfall amazes. Players won’t regret staking their claim on Arkane’s latest masterpiece.
OK. Enough with the professional reviews. Let’s see what people who paid for the game—and if you bought this instead of playing on Game Pass it was a full-price $70 release, an important point to remember here—have to say. Here’s a selection of some of the top Steam reviews at time of posting:
Ignoring the performance issues, this game is bad. The AI is pathetic, even on the highest difficulty. The controls are clunky. The graphics are average. The world is empty. I don’t understand why these companies think they can start charging $70 for unfinished garbage. I couldn’t even stomach an hour of this game.
Extremely average and unfinished game. Poor performance on PC and riddled with bugs and glitches.
I’ve heard great things from Arkane, but this is not it. I played with two friends, who also refunded. Going to try and give it a go tonight on the $10 PC Game Pass instead. But that first hour was clear to me: this is not a $70 AAA release.
I’m going to wind up with that last one because, having played it for most of yesterday, it’s actually the closest to my own experiences with the game. This plays like a remaster of a PS3 shooter. It’s an unfinished concept piece, a pitch project that somehow made its way to retail.
It’s tough to explain how raw the whole thing feels without playing it yourself. Even the fonts look like placeholders. Arkane is a studio responsible for some of the most important first-person games of the last decade; to see their name attached to this just…really bums me out.
Anyway! Like I said, our own impressions will be coming soon, so check back to see if a few days of multiplayer madness will have our team (not me, I live on the far side of the moon) thinking any differently to these reviews.
Only 4 weeks but the former owner left her out in the cold. Coonhound. Apparently coonhounds were bred to chase prey up trees and then howl real loud so the hunter can tell where they went, then shoot the animal in the tree. That’s where the phrase “barking up the wrong tree” came from.
