When it comes to crossovers between movie franchises, I think it’s fair to be a bit cynical about how the proverbial sausage gets made. Hollywood obviously loves its well-known intellectual properties, and having two blend together frequently feels like a very orchestrated move executed principally for box office-centric reasons. That being said, one could be excused for thinking that the influence of Alien on the upcoming Predator: Badlands was a starting point from which the new 2025 blockbuster grew, but that’s not actually the case, as the big screen reunion of the sci-fi legends came together surprisingly organically behind the scenes.
Last summer, I took a trip with a small group of other journalists to Auckland, New Zealand to visit the set of Predator: Badlands when the film was still in production, and one of the big reveals during interviews was that the story would feature key elements from Alien: namely, Elle Fanning is playing multiple android characters built by the sinister Weyland-Yutani Corporation. It’s obviously not the first time that these two franchises have collided (see: the easter egg at the end of Predator 2 and the Alien vs. Predator movies), but it’s notable that director Dan Trachtenberg didn’t actually set out to execute a new collision with the film. Instead, it came about simply because he didn’t want to have to include any humans in the blockbuster.
Unlike any of the previous Predator films, Predator: Badlands is special in that it features a Yautja protagonist – specifically an outcast runt named Dek, played by newcomer Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi. In developing the story with writer Patrick Aison, Trachtenberg told us that there was an effort to stay away from human characters because it would have both made the story too familiar and undercut the uniqueness of the approach that he wanted to execute. Said the filmmaker,
I just got tantalized with like, ‘It’s about a Predator protagonist.’ I don’t want to include anything that’ll take the thunder away from that and have there be a human sidekick that inevitably – through maybe through my own inclinations or the studio, whatever it is – start to skew things into, ‘Let’s make it more about the human,’ because then it ends up being a lot like other movies that are similar to this.
This makes all the sense in the world. Audiences tend to gravitate toward the characters to which we most relate, and in a story about a monstrous alien and a human, we’re definitely going to find the latter to be the more appealing. When a film is trying to execute a new kind of adventure that challenges what movie-goers are used to, such an inclusion can end up being a crutch, and that’s not something that Dan Trachtenberg was interested in.
With a desire to tell a two-hander story, Predator: Badlands needed a workaround, and the filmmakers found one. Instead of a human, it was decided that it would be cool to see Dek teamed up with a robot… and it was only after that idea was raised that Weyland-Yutani synthetics entered the conversation and were recognized as a perfect and super cool solution. Trachtenberg continued,
I’m cheating a little bit by realizing, ‘Oh, maybe it’s a robot.’ And then it was like, ‘Well, that’s cool. Like it’s a monster and a robot,’ you know? And then I was like, ‘Wait a minute! There’s a way in which it can be…’ And then that just sort of blossomed the other grander ideas, you know?
As to not interfere with the rest of the existing canon, Predator: Badlands is set in a future beyond anything we’ve previously seen in either the Predator or Alien franchises, and it centers on Dek, who gets lost on an extremely dangerous planet and has to show his mettle to survive (and prove his value to his species despite his diminutive size). He ends up finding Thia (Elle Fanning), a legless android also stranded on the strange world, and they team up in an effort to stay alive and get rescued.
Following the animated anthology adventure Predator: Killer Of Killers from this past summer, Predator: Badlands gives fans the most intimate look yet at the warrior culture of the Yautja and promises an adventure unlike anything we’ve seen in any of the canon’s previous stories. Should you need a refresher course, all of the previous Predator movies (including Predator, Predator 2, Predators, The Predator, Prey and Killer of Killers) are available to stream with a Hulu subscription, but Predator: Badlands will exclusively be playing in theaters starting November 7.
