The ‘Predator’ Franchise Is Back With a New Movie

The Predator franchise is back in the hunt.

A year and a half after the franchise’s first prequel Prey became Hulu’s biggest streaming premiere ever, word is emerging that a new film is now in development — and from Prey’s director, Dan Trachtenberg.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the new film is called Badlands. They don’t offer much in the way of plot details, although they note the movie is not a direct sequel to Prey and is “said to be set sometime in the future.”

Like Prey, though, Badlands will reportedly feature “a female lead.”

Fox

Prey, directed by Trachtenberg, imagined the first time one of the extraterrestrial hunters arrived on Earth, way back in 1700s North America. There, the alien battled a Comanche warrior played by Amber Midthunder.

It was the fifth film in the long-running sci-fi horror franchise — or the seventh, if you include the two crossover movies that partnered the Predator with another former Fox property, Alien. The original film, from 1987, became one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature action vehicles, and saw him doing battle with a bizarre-looking creature created by the late special effects designer Stan Winston.

Schwarzenegger never made another Predator, but Fox produced three more sequels over the following years. Predator 2 featured Danny Glover battling the Predator in a dystopian Los Angeles. Predators followed a slew of violent killers (led by Adrien Brody) in a fight with the monster. Finally The Predator opened in theaters in 2018, from writer/director Shane Black — who had previously appeared in the original film in a small role as of Schwarzenegger’s Special Forces squad.

THR claims that following the success of Prey, 20th Century Studios is “planning a host of Predator projects, with Trachtenberg at the center.”

Prey is still available for streaming on Hulu.