The Predator may be one of the fiercest (and ugliest!) movie monsters in film history, but come 2018, a ragtag squad of jaded, shellshocked soldiers will be primed and ready to exterminate the extra-terrestrial threats when they arrive on our doorsteps. And that’s threats plural.
For in Shane Black’s sci-fi reboot, a number of hunter-aliens descend upon a suburban setting to begin their killing spree. But it looks like they’re about to meet a strong and, crucially, human resistance. As Thomas Jane revealed to Shadow Nation (via Bloody Disgusting), The Predator chronicles the story of war veterans pulled into a brutal, interspecies brawl, while there also appears to be elements of a UFO conspiracy thrown in for good measure.
In fact, as Jane alludes to below, those soldiers quickly take matters into their own hands once shit hits the fan:
We play these veterans from like Afghanistan, Iraq war or whatever. But we’re all fucking crazy so we go to the VA hospital to get our meds. We’re all like shellshocked, PTSD… soldiers. We’re at the VA hospital and we’re in group therapy and of course, somebody flips out…this is backstory, I don’t think we really see this…somebody flips out and we all get arrested and get thrown onto the bus to go down to the hospital and they throw this other guy on the bus too.
Flanked by Boyd Holbrook, Olivia Munn, Trevante Rhodes, Keegan-Michael Key, Sterling K. Brown, Jacob Tremblay, Yvonne Strahovski and Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones), Jane is undoubtedly part of an all-star cast, and though he didn’t name-drop any characters, in particular, we understand those aforementioned soldiers will form Shane Black’s special Predator-hunting operation in 2018.
Jane continued:
And he’s a guy…they’ve actually marked to kill him because he’s seen a UFO, he’s seen the Predator ships come down so they lock him up and throw him in with us lunatic. They’re going to take that bus, drive it down to a ditch and shoot us all just to get rid of this one guy. But, of course, we take the bus over and we’re all like ‘fuck that man, let’s go kill these fucking Predators ourselves’ and we’re just crazy enough to believe that this guy really did see a UFO and there’s these aliens out there.
“You’ll never see him coming.” Once scheduled for a release in February of 2018, when Shane Black’s R-rated reboot would’ve faced strong competition from Black Panther, The Predator has since relocated to August 3rd, 2018.