Predator: Badlands

[TangledThorns]

It's not your typical PREDATOR film but it looks like a great sci-fi flick altogether. Sign me up! 

[electric indigo]

Same here - I like the look and the tone.

[Black Valkyrie]

Awesome.  At least you are in one piece, look what happened to me (C3po - TESB). 

[Hikuro]

could be fun. who knows!

[TangledThorns]

I showed the trailer to my wife and she said... "isn't the predator supposed to be invisible?" lol!

 

[Bolt]

2 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

I showed the trailer to my wife and she said... "isn't the predator supposed to be invisible?" lol!

 

Lol. Junior here ,doesn't  have the upgrades yet.  
I'm expecting a good time . Definitely watching this on the big screen.

[sh9000]

I'm interested in seeing more of Elle Fanning's character.

[Black Valkyrie]

On 7/22/2025 at 1:52 AM, Black Valkyrie said:

Awesome.  At least you are in one piece, look what happened to me (C3po - TESB). 

 

https://www.ign.com/articles/predator-badlands-director-confirms-the-whole-predator-carrying-an-android-idea-was-inspired-by-chewbacca-carrying-c-3po-in-star-wars-sdcc-2025

 

[Bolt]

Went to see the opening show of Demon Slayer on the big screen with my son. The Predator Badlands trailer on the big screen just looked awesome. I'm definitely hyped for it now.

[Graham]

Don't have high hopes for this, but will probably still go to see it.

 

[TangledThorns]

 

 

 

[Tking22]

Still looking pretty good to me, might make the splurge and go actually see this one in IMAX. 

[Seto Kaiba]

 

Hmm... I dunno, my hopes are not high for this one.

After rewatching the first couple Predator movies, I feel like it's not a great idea to make a Predator the protagonist of the movie.  IMO, what makes the Predators work as the sci-fi horror movie monsters they were/are is that they're inscrutable.  They couldn't be communicated with or understood.  They were just these aliens hunting people for sport because they could.  Once you give them dialog and have them explain their culture and the context of their actions to the audience... they're just rubber forehead aliens like in Star Trek and there's no pivoting back to horror after that.  

Basically the same mistake Alien: Earth made by revealing you can absolutely just talk to Xenomorphs and control them with language.

[pengbuzz]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 

Hmm... I dunno, my hopes are not high for this one.

After rewatching the first couple Predator movies, I feel like it's not a great idea to make a Predator the protagonist of the movie.  IMO, what makes the Predators work as the sci-fi horror movie monsters they were/are is that they're inscrutable.  They couldn't be communicated with or understood.  They were just these aliens hunting people for sport because they could.  Once you give them dialog and have them explain their culture and the context of their actions to the audience... they're just rubber forehead aliens like in Star Trek and there's no pivoting back to horror after that.  

Basically the same mistake Alien: Earth made by revealing you can absolutely just talk to Xenomorphs and control them with language.

Villain Decay™, brought to you by the Borg.

[Big s]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Basically the same mistake Alien: Earth made by revealing you can absolutely just talk to Xenomorphs and control them with language.

Not only that, but an android communicating and making buddies is kinda a bit too soon. The next movie will be a buddy movie where androids aliens and predators are just on a road trip

[sh9000]

[Seto Kaiba]

14 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Villain Decay™, brought to you by the Borg.

Ouch.  Yeah, it is about that bad isn't it, if we've gone from "inscrutable alien spree killer hunting the most elite soldiers in the world" to "alien hunter intern tries to prove himself and land a full-time position".

 

14 hours ago, Big s said:

Not only that, but an android communicating and making buddies is kinda a bit too soon. The next movie will be a buddy movie where androids aliens and predators are just on a road trip

Makes you wonder how they can even understand each other, since the Predators don't exactly speak English and have tried to avoid contact with Humanity except on the hunt.

[Big s]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Makes you wonder how they can even understand each other, since the Predators don't exactly speak English and have tried to avoid contact with Humanity except on the hunt.

I’d almost get that predators could understand English or at least some earth languages. They’ve been recording and sometimes using those recordings to mimic their Prey even in the older movies. Not saying they understood those recordings then, but maybe down the line. I don’t really have an understanding of their home world society, since they haven’t given much info on it, and it seems to change somewhat every few years for even the slightest bit of info we have on them. 
Personally I think the less we know about them the better. Alien keeps making the mistake of giving us too much background information and it’s usually disappointing 

[TangledThorns]

And its rated PG-13... which I'm not surprised about with the trailers. 

[Big s]

1 hour ago, TangledThorns said:

And its rated PG-13... which I'm not surprised about with the trailers. 

I didn’t notice that, that sucks. I’ll definitely stay home then.

[Tking22]

A PG-13 rating doesn't deter me, I still think it looks great and me and a couple buddies grabbed IMAX tickets last night. That said, PG-13 is certainly disappointing, especially after Prey being rated R and going hard on the violence and gore. 

[TangledThorns]

Yeah, I think the PG-13 rating will impact the dialog  which I think was always an important and humorous part of the previous films too.

 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

And its rated PG-13... which I'm not surprised about with the trailers. 

Wait, it's a PG-13 Predator movie?

That definitely feels like a misstep.  I might've been tempted to see it in theaters, but now I think I'll wait for the streaming release.  Sounds like they're making the same mistake as the first Alien vs Predator movie too.

 

18 hours ago, Big s said:

I’d almost get that predators could understand English or at least some earth languages. They’ve been recording and sometimes using those recordings to mimic their Prey even in the older movies. Not saying they understood those recordings then, but maybe down the line.

Well, yeah... but that's not an indicator of understanding the content of what's being said.  I can record and play back birdcalls and the vocalizations of primates, but that doesn't mean I know what they're actually saying.  

 

18 hours ago, Big s said:

I don’t really have an understanding of their home world society, since they haven’t given much info on it, and it seems to change somewhat every few years for even the slightest bit of info we have on them. 
Personally I think the less we know about them the better. Alien keeps making the mistake of giving us too much background information and it’s usually disappointing 

I'm definitely with you there.  The less we know the better, because their inscrutability was the main thing that made them scary.  They were the Unknown and the Unknowable.

You can't make them scary again as an unknown menace once you've been to their home and met their mum.

[Big s]

37 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Wait, it's a PG-13 Predator movie?

That definitely feels like a misstep.  I might've been tempted to see it in theaters, but now I think I'll wait for the streaming release.  Sounds like they're making the same mistake as the first Alien vs Predator movie too.

I honestly didn’t realize until last night after reading this here that they made that mistake again. The great thing about the Predator is that not only are they creepy unseen killers, but that they gruesomely take trophies. This movie is was already sounding too tame, but now it’s a bit too silly for me to care about. I may still check it out on D+, but I’m really not excited about it.

[Hikuro]

That is Disney and what’s left of fox trying to play it safe to get dollars. You’d think they had learned their lesson in previous films but alas. 

[kajnrig]

It's entirely possible that the PG-13 was achieved solely because of the blood and other bodily fluids being non-red. I'm reminded of the Transformers movies getting away with Bumblebee essentially doing a Predator spine pull, in slow motion, in crisp 8K IMAX 3D Smellovision UHD, because the enemy wasn't human and the "blood" was a yellow-green "robot juice."

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

You can't make them scary again as an unknown menace once you've been to their home and met their mum.

The property was doing that as soon as the second movie. And that's even without considering the comics, games, etc. The fact they have a proper species name at all - "Yautja" - means they've long been de-fanged.

[Seto Kaiba]

19 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

It's entirely possible that the PG-13 was achieved solely because of the blood and other bodily fluids being non-red. I'm reminded of the Transformers movies getting away with Bumblebee essentially doing a Predator spine pull, in slow motion, in crisp 8K IMAX 3D Smellovision UHD, because the enemy wasn't human and the "blood" was a yellow-green "robot juice."

I did some checking, and it seems that Predator: Badlands producer Ben Rosenblatt confirmed your hypothesis is correct in an interview with IGN published yesterday.

Per Rosenblatt:

Quote

We don't have any humans in the movie and so we don't have any human red blood.  So we're hoping that's gonna play to our advantage.  We're going to go as hard as we possibly can within those constraints, and we think we'll be able to do some pretty awesomely gruesome stuff.  But in colors other than red.

TBH, that borders on "distinction without difference" in terms of my reaction.  "No humans were harmed" is kind of the antithesis of a Predator movie, IMO.  The Predator taking down a goofy all-CG space critter and getting splattered with food dye doesn't have the same visceral impact or invoke the same fear that seeing one kill and take trophies from actual humans does. 

The same goes for watching our intern space hunter whack a bunch of unfeeling robots.  (There's a reason the Star Wars prequel trilogy used droids as the enemy... so they could be offed en masse without the audience sympathizing with them at all.)

 

 

19 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

The property was doing that as soon as the second movie. And that's even without considering the comics, games, etc. The fact they have a proper species name at all - "Yautja" - means they've long been de-fanged.

I'm not sure the comics, games, etc. have ever been canon there... but the second movie didn't really do anything except briefly let the protagonist into a misty, indistinct room on their ship for a bit so they could spook him, hand him a trophy for reasons unclear, and then go about their business.  They stayed pretty inscrutable.  It's not the same as having one of their interns spend two hours getting the snot kicked out of him as a focus character.

[pengbuzz]

 

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Wait, it's a PG-13 Predator movie?

That definitely feels like a misstep.  I might've been tempted to see it in theaters, but now I think I'll wait for the streaming release.  Sounds like they're making the same mistake as the first Alien vs Predator movie too.

 

Well, yeah... but that's not an indicator of understanding the content of what's being said.  I can record and play back birdcalls and the vocalizations of primates, but that doesn't mean I know what they're actually saying.  

 

I'm definitely with you there.  The less we know the better, because their inscrutability was the main thing that made them scary.  They were the Unknown and the Unknowable.

You can't make them scary again as an unknown menace once you've been to their home and met their mum.

The Predator race seem to be based off of crabs, if I'm reading their morphology correctly. If that's the case...

Spoiler

 

Problem solved.

 

 

[Big s]

30 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

 

The Predator race seem to be based off of crabs, if I'm reading their morphology correctly. If that's the case...

  Hide contents

 

Problem solved.

 

 

I don’t know, they seem to be lacking a carapace. Although the face thingies are a bit crabby. Hopefully they more like snow crab, cause that stuff is so good even without seasoning or butter, nice and naturally sweet. Now I’m gettin hungry again