Predator veteran Arnie would have made a small cameo in the latest film in the beloved sci-fi franchise, but it was not to be.
If you caught last year’s Predator: Badlands – and you should make time for it if you didn’t – you might recall a scene early on in the proceedings where our heroic “runt” Predator, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) and his bigger, tougher, elder brother are perusing a bunch of holograms, and one of them is that of Amber Midthunder’s Naru, the ballsy Comanche heroine of the previous Predator flick, Prey.
It’s a fun little moment that creates a little more connective tissue between the most recent Predator installments, harkening back to Naru’s brief cameo in the animated Disney+ anthology film, Predator: Killer Of Killers. But in a new interview, writer and director Dan Trachtenberg has revealed that the scene was originally going to be longer and include holograms of both the xenomorph from sister franchise Alien, and Dutch Schaeffer, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character from the original 1987 Predator.
Speaking to ScreenRant, Trachtenberg said that he’d “…wanted to nod to our favorite characters that the Predators have fought against over the years,” but the rewriting and production process whittled down the scene until there was really only room for Naru.
“There were more holograms to be in the background. And what we have now is more soft focus in the foreground, you kind of see it and all that.”
Eagle-eyed fans will recall that both Schwarzenegger’s Dutch and Danny Glover’s Mike Harrigan from Predator 2 cropped up briefly in Killer Of Killers, in suspended animation like Naru, but Badlands would have marked the big lad’s first live action return to the franchise if things had gone according to the original plan.
Expect to see Midthunder’s Naru again, though. Trachtenberg apparently considered putting her in Badlands, but decided to hold off for a future instalment.
“I had other cool thoughts for what Naru could do in the future and was like, ‘Oh, that would be awesome for that.’ But I could feel it. There’s definitely a version where you find Naru on that planet, and she has to [survive], and they meet — I could see that version and didn’t want to spend all the chips right away.”
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