Predator: Badlands director explains why he didn't do a traditional sequel to acclaimed Prey

Back in 2022, director Dan Trachtenberg found a fascinating new way in to the Predator franchise with his excellent prequel Prey, setting the action in the Commanche nation in the 18th century.

Given the acclaim that film garnered, you might imagine that he'd adopt a similar approach for his next film in the series, but in fact he's done something very different. Predator: Badlands, which is due for release this week and has already received strong reviews from critics, is set on a distant planet in the distant future and does something especially radical: making the Predator itself the protagonist.

The Predator in question is a young outcast named Dek, who is sent to a deadly planet and forms an unlikely bond with synthetic human (Elle Fanning) as they each try to navigate the dangerous territory.

So where did Trachtenberg first get the idea for this approach?

"It was at the end of the process with Prey, and we were starting to show it to people, and it was being warmly received," he explained during an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com. "And I started to realise, 'They might ask me to do a sequel. Uh oh. Like, I've not thought about that at all. What would I do?'"

Trachtenberg added that sometimes when people "make a cool thing" the impulse is simply to follow it with "just the sequel to the cool thing" rather than something that is interesting in and of itself. This was a trap that he wanted to avoid falling into.

"I was really pressuring myself to try and figure out," he said. "Forget Prey, forget I even did that. What do I want to do? Do I still want to make another Predator movie, and what hasn't been done in Predator and what hasn't been done in movies? And that was where the big idea came from."

He added that the idea of turning the monster into the hero of the story – and getting people to root for it – was "a thing that just has not existed in sci fi at all", and this was something that immediately excited him.

Of course, this idea also gave him plenty of opportunity to add to the Predator lore – something he has also done with the straight-to-streaming animated triptych Predator: Killer of Killers that arrived on Disney Plus earlier in the year. And he explained that he wanted to "widen the doors a little bit into the culture" of the species without completely overhauling it.

"There could have been a version of this movie that was all on Yautja Prime [the home of the Predator species]," he said. "That was all about the clan and and the culture and what have you. But instead, it really is just a little bit wider of a peek.

"You get a sense of the culture, and then you're off with Dek on his journey through a gauntlet – the way that we've seen all the human protagonists go through in previous films."

Predator: Badlands is released exclusively in cinemas on Friday 7th November.

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