A PREDATOR MOVIE THAT DOESN’T NEED ARNOLD

_{Thia, portrayed by Elle Fanning, and Dek, portrayed by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, in Predator: Badlands. (20th Century Studios/Disney via AP)}

The year was 1987. Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of the box office champions. In the original Predator, Schwarzenegger and his military comrades are set off on a military mission in a jungle of a foreign country. They are successful, but what they don’t know is that there is a mysterious alien creature who hunts them down as prey. It eventually comes down to Arnold’s battle for survival against the creature. Essentially, if one took an Alien movie (more on this series as well) and remolded it into an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Predator was the result.

The movie was successful, but there was one problem when it came for sequel time: Arnold didn’t want to act in sequels, feeling there was no more to be told. Predator 2 (1990) is set in Los Angeles, with the alien having more prey to hunt down. Danny Glover led the film. I was in high school when this sequel came out, and I remember a conversation with a friend about this. I told him that a sequel was coming out. He then asked me if Arnold was in it. When I told him no, he had no interest in seeing it. I did see it eventually. I don’t remember the film very well, but I do remember that while I didn’t find it terrible, there was nothing groundbreaking about it. Throughout the ’90s, there were no more Predator movies.

 In 2004, Hollywood decided to merge Predator with the Alien series. The result was Alien vs. Predator. In this movie, the lead character, Lex (played by Sanaa Lathan), must align with a Predator creature to battle the Alien. This was a profitable film that made a worldwide total of $177.4 million. I saw this film as well, and while I can’t remember much about it, I do remember feeling underwhelmed. They could have done so much with these two iconic creatures. I wanted to ask the filmmakers, “Is this really the best you can come up with?”

But no matter. Its success resulted in another sequel released in 2007, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. In this movie, the Predator who helped out our heroine in the first installment is infected with an alien coming out of its stomach. The spaceship carrying the infected Predator crashes on Earth and causes the alien to invade a nearby town. Only a skilled Predator hunter can stop it. Although this film grossed $130.2 million on a $40 million budget, plans for another sequel were abandoned.

Predator was solo again, and two more films were released in the 2010s. The creature is back to being the villain again after being the hero in both Alien vs. Predator movies. The Predator as villain first happens in Predators (2010), where proficient killers are kidnapped and placed on a planet with Predators. They must avoid becoming prey and return to Earth. Then The Predator (2018) has one of the most bizarre concepts in the series, where an autistic child can translate and understand Predator technology, thus helping his hero father defeat the Predators. Neither of these films was a huge success.

But in 2022, filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg decided to do something different. He made a TV movie, Prey, set in 1719, where a Comanche woman must prove herself to her tribe by not only fighting an alien but also the fur traders who are destroying the buffalo, which the Comanche tribe needs to survive. Prey was enough of a success that Trachtenberg made an adult animated anthology series called Predator: Killer of Killers (2025), where human characters in different centuries must fight off Predator antagonists.

But that wasn’t the only film Trachtenberg made in 2025. He made Predator: Badlands, a film that is set on a different planet. But there were some differences between this film and the other films in the series. For one, the Predator alien is the protagonist and has a Droid as its sidekick.

In the film, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is a runt Predator from the planet Yautja Prime. In the first scene, we see Dek train with his brother Kwei (Mike Homik). Although the two appear to fight to the death, we also see the love the brothers have for each other. Kwei trains Dek to go to the planet Genna and hunt down the Kalisk, an unkillable creature, to earn the approval of their father, Njohrr (Reuben de Jong). However, Njohrr sees Dek as too weak to earn his approval. Njohrr orders Kwei to kill him. Kwei refuses, putting Dek on a ship to Genna and sacrificing his life to save his little brother.

As Dek arrives at Genna, he is determined to kill the Kalisk and come back to Yaujta to avenge his older brother’s murder. On Genna, he comes across Thia (Elle Fanning), a damaged robot missing her legs. Thia is also from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, who was referenced in the original Alien film (1979). Unlike Dek, who is stoic, Thia is a Chatty Cathy who is programmed with knowledge  about Dek and his universe, but other universes as well. Dek reluctantly takes her on as a guide because she understands the planet and can lead him to the Kalisk. So, for once, a character in the Alien universe teams up with a character in the Predator universe, joined by a native Genna creature who Thia names “Bud.”

The most intriguing part of Predator: Badlands is that it’s a series with no human protagonists, yet it deals with human themes. One of them is whether love is a sign of strength or weakness. In the beginning, we learn that on Dek’s home planet, family does not value love but only strength to survive. Likewise, as we learn Thia has a synthetic sister named Tessa (also played by Fanning). While Thia lost her legs in her fight with the Kalisk, Tessa dived in to protect her from damage, and thus Thia sees her as a sister. However, when we meet Tessa as the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is repairing her, we realize she does not see the incident as sisterly love, but weakness.

Our protagonists are not only forced to examine love but who they really are deep down, and whether they want to be part of the group from which they originated. This involves whether their mission is noble, and the question of who are actually the good guys in this film.

Like the best of sequels, Predator: Badlands respects the original source material without trying to emulate it.  Audiences have rewarded it with a better-than-expected domestic $40 million dollars during opening weekend, making it the biggest opening weekend of any Predator movie. Likewise, it has gained $40 million overseas. That is very encouraging for a movie budgeted at $109–120 million. It is also encouraging for Disney, who has distributed the film after a disappointing October where both Disney films, Tron: Ares and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, bombed at the box office.

However, it is most impressive that a film franchise that started as an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle can finally create a film that does not need Arnold to succeed.