The ‘Predator’ Franchise Is a Blank Canvas for Hollywood
It’s not easy to be a legacy Hollywood franchise in 2025. Decades of box office dominance for any character recognizable enough to hold up a “cinematic universe” moniker inevitably fell through, and the pandemic-fueled streaming wars yielded an era of oversaturation that rendered even cultural touchstones like Spider-Man and “Star Wars” feeling a little trite. The bar to interest us in something we’ve seen before is higher than ever. So why on Earth is the “Predator” franchise having a moment?
Ten years ago, nobody would have ever labeled the “Predator” series — which launched with John McTiernan’s 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle before spawning three decades of mediocre sequels that occasionally intermingled with the “Alien” franchise without any larger central planning — a blue chip I.P. Its struggles began with the depressingly Schwarzenegger-free “Predator 2” that hit theaters in 1990, and it never quite found an identity until 2022’s “Prey,” despite myriad reboots and sequel attempts in the meantime.
It’s something of a miracle that the franchise managed to hang around the zeitgeist for as long as it did. There were no major returning actors or ongoing storylines, save for the Yautja’s somewhat inexplicable obsession with intergalactic trophy hunting, and most attempts to reboot the property failed to explain why this series should exist in the first place. The first film‘s brilliance lay in the overdose of human testosterone it provided in the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers high-fiving and spitting out iconic quotes like “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” You could have inserted almost any monster into the antagonist role and produced a similarly watchable result. Even the film’s title made that clear. The film wasn’t called “Yautja,” because nobody really cared about the monsters at its core. We just wanted to see tough guys slaying some kind of predator.
The franchise lacks the the Campbell-esque mythology of “Star Wars,” the mainstream appeal of Marvel, the environmental consciousness of “Avatar”… the list could go on. Its entire value proposition seems to rely on the fact that it was first to market with a catchy name and that it boasts a semi-recognizable creature to trot out in new scenarios every few years.
All of which, to be clear, is complimentary.
“Predator” might not have had much of an identity for most of my lifetime, but it sure has one now. It can be distilled down to the mantra: “Let Dan Trachtenberg cook.” His 2022 film “Prey,” which took the “Predator” movies back in time to 1719, starred Amber Midthunder as a young Comanche woman who has to take down a Yautja with an arsenal of weapons that’s far more rudimentary than the machine guns that Arnold had to work with. The direct-to-Hulu movie was fresh, fun, and the last thing anyone was expecting from the series. And its appeal was instantly communicable to anyone with even a passing interest in blockbusters, regardless of their familiarity with “Predator” lore. Really, who wouldn’t want to see a battle between bows and arrows and a hyper-advanced alien species with a penchant for trophy hunting?
The success of “Prey” landed Trachtenberg the job of de facto “Predator” showrunner, and his stewardship of the franchise has followed the “What else do you want to see these crazy alien guys do?” ethos to splendid results. He followed that with the excellent animated anthology “Predator: Killer of Killers” (co-directed with Joshua Wassung) that saw the Yautja face off against a viking, a ninja, and a World War II fighter pilot for no apparent reason other than the desire to see if one really tough thing could kill another really tough thing. There was no narrative justification for any of it, and yet it’s impossible to deny that it was all cool as hell!
Just when it seemed like Trachtenberg and company might have had a repeatable formula figured out, they swerved in another direction with “Predator: Badlands.” The new film, which opens in theaters this weekend, flips the script by casting a Yautja as the protagonist for a change. It follows Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a runt of the litter who is cast out of his tribe by a father who despises his weakness. He’s sent to the deadly planet Genna, where every flora and fauna has evolved to be as lethal as possible, and given the seemingly impossible task of killing a fierce creature known as the Kalisk. Rather than an imposing bad guy to slay before he slays you, this Yautja is now presented as a vulnerable hero who has to learn to show empathy and team up with others. What a concept!
It doesn’t set up any obvious direction for the “Predator” movies to go next, which is precisely why I’m so curious to watch the next one. At a cultural moment when we’ve watched all of our favorite franchises do what they do best so many times that nothing feels sacred anymore, maybe our best reprieve from the monotony is a franchise that never quite figured out what it does best. The next “Predator” adventure could believably be anything from a legacy sequel with Arnold Schwarzenegger to a period romance in which a Yautja tries to court a wife in 19th century England, and we’ve been conditioned to just take it all in stride.
Which creative has the best job in Hollywood? Taking out obvious unicorns like Christopher Nolan who can reliably lean on their name and resume to make anything they want, the answer would have to be someone who can maintain an affiliation with an I.P without having any real creative limitations imposed on them. My default answer to that question used to be Charlie Brooker — “Black Mirror” is technically an I.P., but the show’s anthology format essentially means he has a budget and a built-in audience for any original sci-fi idea under two hours. But I now think the case could be made that Trachtenberg has the best gig within the studio system, as he could cram a career’s worth of original blockbuster ideas into the loosely-defined boundaries of the “Predator” franchise. Given that he’s three-for-three so far, I doubt I’m alone in hoping he does just that.
There’s a lesson to be learned within all of this for any filmmaker with big ideas who isn’t quite breathing the rarified air of A-list directors with blank checks. Instead of pursuing chances to pitch reboots of Hollywood’s most beloved properties, scraping the bottom of the barrel might afford you more opportunities to make films that truly feel your own. Franchise fatigue is real, but Dan Trachtenberg has convincingly made the case that the solution lies in starting with underdeveloped franchises.
A 20th Century Studios release, “Predator: Badlands” opens in theaters on Friday, November 7.
