If you’ve been keeping track of the latest developments surrounding the Predator franchise, then you’ll know that 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg has been tasked with tackling the next reinvention for the extraterrestrial icons. In fact, the filmmaker recently revealed that he’d been working on the project for the last four years, and he wasn’t best pleased that the news was made public.
Shane Black’s The Predator may have been the highest-grossing solo outing for the trophy hunters yet, but it was almost as expensive to produce as the previous three installments combined, so a global haul of just over $160 million was viewed as a major disappointment. Trachtenberg’s movie, meanwhile, is reportedly a prequel focusing on a female Native American warrior, which sounds like a solid way of stripping the concept back to basics and also lowering the budgetary costs, making it a win-win for the studio in theory.
Insider Daniel Richtman has also been constantly reporting that a sequel to 2010’s underrated cult favorite Predators in in the works despite such a thing remaining unconfirmed at this time, and he’s now claiming that both of the new sci-fi actioners will feature the most advanced Predators yet, sporting the latest in their species’ cutting-edge technology.
In the case of Trachtenberg’s Predator, this feels like a mismatch on paper when there’s every chance that the intrepid heroine might not even have access to the most basic of amenities given the setting. However, Predators boasted the heaviest sci-fi trappings in the franchise’s history, and if the hypothetical sequel Richtman claims is happening gets the green light, then upping the ante would seem like a foregone conclusion, one that would increase the sense of scale and danger that comes burdened with a hulking race of murderous aliens who kill for sport.