The upcoming sci-fi sequel is taking us to a whole new world.
We were just musing the other day that we hadn’t had a Predator: Badlands trailer yet, and lo: the universe corrected itself. Hot on the heels of our first look at Predator: Killer of Killers, here’s the first Badlands teaser.
Cool cool cool.
Directed by Dan Trachtenberg (Prey), who also co-write the script with Patrick Aison, Predator: Badlands mixes things up by setting itself farther in the future. How far, you ask? Well, we’ve known for a while that Elle Fanning was playing a character who teams up with a young predator on an alien world. But we didn’t know ’til now that she was playing an android. A Weyland-Yutani artificial person called Thia.
Weyland-Yutani, as all seasoned nerds and possibly even you know, is the malevolent Company of the Alien franchise. The Predator and Alien universes sort of connect are are the same, depending on what’s considered canon on any given morning. It all started with that bloody xenomorph skull in Predator 2, but since Ridley Scott did Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, who can say what counts?
Well, Predator: Badlands does, for the moment at least. Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, a New Zealand stuntman and actor, is playing Dek, the outcast Predator Thia teams up with. Other than that, no further cast members have been announced. The assumption seems to be that the pair are on the Predator home world, but official word on that doesn’t seem to have come through yet. That would kind of make it a sci-fi riff on Walkabout, though. If you squint a bit.
But that Weyland-Yutani presence does seem to indicate an effort to yoke the two franchises more firmly together. While we’re getting two Predator works this year, Alien: Romulus smashed the BO last year, and we have Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth series due on Disney+ later this year. Teen-friendly Romulus made Alien hot IP again, whatever its failings, and Predator could benefit from that synergy. Or maybe it’s just a throwaway gag and my brain’s been franchise-poisoned by almost three decades of the MCU.
We’ll find out when Predator: Badlands hits Australian cinemas on November 6.
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