Director Dan Trachtenberg is obviously having a blast playing in the Predator franchise sandbox, and he’s reshaped it. After the critical and audience success of Prey in 2022, which dropped the Yautja into 1719 and faced it off with a Comanche warrior, Trachtenberg found himself with more stories to tell.
Now we’ve got Predator: Badlands coming and the animated Predator: Killer of Killers, and they are taking the franchise in awesome and wild new directions! Trailers have been released for both of these projects, and fans seem to be loving what they’re seeing.
During a press event covered by ComicBook, Trachtenberg opened up about his creative process and how Badlands was actually the first Predator concept he pitched before Prey took off.
“I had three very cool ideas. One of them, the first one, the one I was the most excited about at the time, was Badlands. But then there was this other thing, that was Prey, [that] was really cool.
“We got to put the Predator in these different time periods and tell that story. I think the thing that made Prey special, though, wasn’t just Predator in a different time period, it was that the story we were telling was made better by the story of the Predator.”
That’s become a bit of a mission statement for Trachtenberg. He’s trying to make every setting mean something. He said:
“I really wanted to figure out, if we were to do that kind of thing again, how could it be special? And what’s the kind of story we could tell that could be equally badass and awesome, but also emotional and thematic and character-oriented?”
That line of thinking led to Killer of Killers, an animated anthology that swings for the fences in every way imaginable.
The anthology story follows “three of the fiercest warriors in human history: a Viking raider guiding her young son on a bloody quest for revenge, a ninja in feudal Japan who turns against his Samurai brother in a brutal battle for succession, and a WWII pilot who takes to the sky to investigate an otherworldly threat to the Allied cause. But while all these warriors are killers in their own right, they are merely prey for their new opponent – the ultimate killer of killers.”
And if that sounds like the kind of mayhem fans will enjoy! The filmmaker talked about why he opted to go with animation on these stories, saying:
“In thinking about the different time periods, I honed in on the idea of, what if we made an animated movie where we could express ourselves in a way that we don’t get to see?
“We’ve now had all these Predator movies and we’re doing this one that’s crazy different, but still with all the stuff … The other side of the coin that I love in Predator movies is that hard-R, crazy carnage.
“Wouldn’t it be cool to see that in a different medium? So we made this movie, Killer of Killers, at the exact same time, stupidly, but awesomely.”
When asked if he had more animated stories brewing, Trachtenberg didn’t hesitate.
“Certainly. I’m sure you guys see a cool movie and [say], ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if…?’ That [thinking] doesn’t turn off for me. So there’s tons of cool things. We’ll see if we get to make it. People have to like it.”
Meanwhile, Predator: Badlands is heading into totally new territory with an alien planet for the main setting. Elle Fanning stars as Thia, a human who forms a bond with a young, outcast Predator (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) as they both search for a worthy adversary. The story leans into the classic theme of the hunt but spins it through survival, trust, and a very unexpected alliance.
The directed went on to say:
“It certainly wasn’t made … I guess the thing that we’re always trying to say is it’s not made [to feel] like it’s just Act One of something larger. I think that’s what we all mean when we say … Christopher Nolan would always say to make it as if it’s the only one.
“It’s really because you don’t want to feel like you were shortchanged by the experience and it was incomplete. These are very much, for me, I won’t sleep at night if I don’t feel like I really communicated with exactly all that I wanted to with both of these movies. So we’re really throwing all our hearts out there.”
Predator: Killer of Killers premieres June 6 on Hulu. Predator: Badlands arrives in theaters November 7.
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