Killer No More? Predator Takes Centre Stage in Dan Trachtenberg's New Sci-Fi Survival Tale
And this time, he's not the only thing worth fearing.
Just when you thought the Predator franchise had found its final form, Dan Trachtenberg is back to flip the whole thing on its mandibles. At the recent LA premiere of Killer of Killers, MovieWeb caught up with the filmmaker and uncovered tantalising new details about his upcoming entry in the legendary sci-fi saga: Predator: Badlands — a film he calls not just different, but a full-blown "inversion" of everything that’s come before.
Let’s backtrack for a moment. Killer of Killers, with its triple-thread storyline, is very much a traditional Predator affair. Think genre-pure slasher vibes: you meet the humans, you root for them, and then… wham. One by one, they’re picked off by a lurking extraterrestrial threat. It’s bloody, brutal, and exactly what fans expect.
But Badlands? That’s a whole new planet.
"This is a very different movie than Killer of Killers," Trachtenberg told MovieWeb. "The exciting approach for Badlands is that — Killer of Killers delivers a very traditional Predator story... Badlands is in some ways an inversion of that, where now you're with the Predator."
That’s right. This time, the monster is the main character. No more peeking through the foliage waiting for him to appear. In Badlands, he is the Arnold. The Naru. The protagonist. And the twist? He’s not hunting humans on Earth — he’s the underdog, dropped onto a savage alien planet teeming with oversized, hyper-deadly life forms. A place where he’s not the apex predator… yet.
"He has to figure out how to survive and hunt down something that’s legendarily been described as unkillable," Trachtenberg explained, painting a picture of a survivalist thriller where our favourite dreadlocked hunter is suddenly the one in danger.
Badlands reimagines the Predator mythos by flipping the script — this time, the hunter becomes the hunted on a deadly alien world. It’s not just another slasher; it’s a survival epic where, for once, we’re rooting for the killer.
