With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.
“Whoever wins, we lose” went the tagline to 2004’s Alien Vs. Predator movie. It was easy enough to chuckle over what seemed like the greatest accidental admission of audience misfortune since 1997’s Mortal Kombat: Annihilation encouraged viewers to “destroy all expectations,” but the losers could also have referred to the Alien and Predator series. Obviously 20th Century Fox considered them each sufficiently debased to justify a Freddy Vs. Jason-style team-up, and then to hold a Requiem for that team-up three years later. What a sorry state of affairs; even today, leading a Run The Series essay on the Predator movies with an Alien Vs. Predator anecdote might seem like blasphemy in light of the 1987 action classic that started it all. Like Alien, the first Predator movie created a movie monster equally impossible to top in its first-time novelty and impossible to resist when attempting sequels anyway.
But the lineage of Predator, like AVP itself, is both more and less debased than it first appears. Yes, Predator (1987) is terrific sci-fi-action pulp, pitting a team of ripped men’s men against a sneaky, well-armed alien hunter, eventually becoming a literal sudden-death match between said alien and nominal human Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s also kind of a ripoff of Alien fused with a ripoff of Rambo (and not the good Rambo movie, either), as well as a proto-T2 try at flipping Arnold from unstoppable hunter to good-guy hunted. Alien is a sci-fi horror classic that evokes primal terrors, labor exploitation, even sexual anxieties. It is, like the horrible beast at its center, nearly perfect. Predator is, like its own creature, wicked cool. In other words, spiritually, AVP is a Predator movie. Predator, as a series, is a “versus” type of enterprise.
Yet at the same time, the series is arguably (if perhaps accidentally) just as committed to the Alien model, in the sense that these movies have also gone in a variety of tonally distinct directions based on a succession of filmmaker pivots. In fact, Predator currently ties Alien in that respect, each boasting seven different filmmakers across nine films. The latest installment, Predator: Badlands, is the third in a row from Dan Trachtenberg, and may ultimately be seen as a turning point from which the series became inescapably self-conscious about its status as a (gag) storytelling franchise, just like the similarly dumb fun of Alien: Romulus. (That forever-franchising, more so than the inclusion of female characters or a PG-13 rating—again, AVP got there first!—seems like the surest current definition of the Disneyfication process, no matter what some YouTubers might try to tell you.) But for now, there are half a dozen Predator movies that each put a reasonably distinct spin on the B-picture formula of the first movie.
If all of this sounds like a denigration of the first Predator, it’s only because until Prey, it was the only Predator movie that hadn’t been consistently underrated to some degree—at least not in the past couple of decades. At the time of its 1987 release, a fustier and appreciably less fanboy-friendly critical class gave it mixed if positive-skewing notices on its way to a solid box office performance. The critical-cultural record corrected itself within a decade or so, perhaps with the retrospective realization that between this and Die Hard, John McTiernan was really on one in the late ’80s. Even before the main alien-versus-human bout begins in Predator, the blocking and choreography of the jungle mercenary team—how they’re arranged in their environment and how McTiernan smoothly transitions from these tableaux into their tactical moves—is uncommonly strong.
That’s what really sets Predator apart from the Rambo sequel that feels like an influence, commercially if not necessarily artistically; First Blood Part II is assaultive and frequently graceless, while Predator only gets more streamlined as it heads toward a dialogue-light final confrontation between beast-like man and humanoid creature. And while it’s not exactly psychologically acute—that’s not really Schwarzenegger’s deal in most of his big movies—there is a warped satisfaction in taking the Rambo-style conceit of mercenaries on a covert mission and erasing the triumphalism to such a degree that most of them are eviscerated by an alien, itself out hunting for its own glory, without the pretense of heroism. In other words, to the unnamed Predator, this grisly violence really is a game. Still, the movie’s legacy, with all its quotable Arnold lines, isn’t satirical or pointed. In fact, a crafty retroactive kinship forms between the decidedly non-underdog physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the more relatable action hero that followed him in McTiernan’s filmography.
McTiernan’s successive triumphs each received a 1990 sequel, and these sequels each nabbed a European Nightmare On Elm Street auteur to make their dumber, louder reiterations. Die Hard 2 got Renny Harlin; Predator 2 (1990) got Stephen Hopkins. Harlin seems like the better deal, and Die Hard 2 is a good-enough follow-up. Yet you have to hand it to Dream Child‘s Stephen Hopkins: He made the more distinct sequel of the two. Set in a 1997 Los Angeles that eerily resembles the gang-dominated, crime-ridden chaos of any given right-winger’s description of any major city in 2025, Predator 2 traffics in some pretty grotesque caricatures, and lacks the Paul Verhoeven-style humor that could allow that material to pass as satire. Still, its sweaty, glass-strewn, neon-bathed, steam-filled, Busey-inclusive action sequences make a solid case for the fried semi-futuristic aesthetics of its “urban jungle” idea, though not its sometimes-appalling social optics. Also, having the Predator battle a middle-aged Danny Glover established early on in the series that the heroes weren’t always going to be bodybuilders.
It’s also difficult to dislike any sequel that nods to Aliens by hiring a relentlessly hammy Bill Paxton to get gorily bumped off by the main monster. Was it fealty to the Easter egg tease of the Xenomorph skull seen on the ship in Predator 2 that wouldn’t allow any further sequels to go forward without first crossing over with Alien? That seems unlikely, but for whatever reason—likely a combination of taste and box office—Predator 2 put the series on ice for years. It was only partially thawed out in the 2000s, for the sake of Alien Vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), which probably only contributed to the sense that Predator was a low-rent association for the beloved Xenomorphs, despite AVP actually being a ton of fun. After Requiem fizzled out in the dark of Christmas, Robert Rodriguez finally made the Predator sequel he had been talking about for years, though he somehow didn’t have time to run-and-gun it himself, producing the film while handing off directing reins to director Nimród Antal.
Predators (2010) represents an expansion of scope for Antal, who had previously specialized in limited-location B-pictures like Vacancy and Armored. In a clever inversion of the original premise, a team of mercenaries who go into a jungle and encounter a Predator become a group of equally lethal strangers who are abducted into a jungle (essentially an otherworldly nature preserve) and encounter four Predators, who compete with each other while hunting down these human killers. The idea of alien conflict must have remained on the brain since Alien Vs. Predator, because The Predator (2018), too, sets up some intra-Predator beef as part of its plot—the only one of the series that de-prioritizes a survival story in favor of greater stakes (though they were rewritten and somewhat downgraded during production). Weirdly, despite those stakes, The Predator is also the funniest and most irreverent of the series, where characters freely refer to these creatures as Predators and Casey (Olivia Munn) points out that killing for fun/honor makes them more akin to bass fishermen. This banter comes courtesy of Shane Black, who graduated from Predator bit player and uncredited punch-up writer to writer-director for the fourth-or-sixth installment. This makes him the only Alien or Predator actor to go on to write and direct a sequel. (Imagine if Paul Reiser randomly directed Prometheus.)
Neither Predators nor The Predator are particularly well-regarded, but they both boast cooler, weirder ensembles than the original lineup of tough guys and/or future governors. Predators has a more traditionally tony-in-retrospect cast; this wasn’t necessarily true in 2010, but now it features a pair of two-time Oscar winners, as well as a frequent Emmy nominee, an Oscar nominee who has also won several Emmys, a beloved character actor, and also Topher Grace. But The Predator might deserve even more credit in the casting department, because it is a mouthy and slightly janky Shane Black movie that somehow knows exactly what to do with several performers who haven’t often been well-served by Hollywood. Olivia Munn had mostly been handed hot-girl supporting roles in big movies, but, armed with her training in fast-paced dialogue from playing the least insufferable person on The Newsroom, she makes a plucky scientist heroine here. Brilliant sketch performer Keegan-Michael Key often seems too big for non-comedies, but he fits perfectly in Black’s assemblage of foulmouthed military misfits, while Sterling K. Brown tosses off lines with a gum-smacking nonchalance.
That cast spouting Black’s dialogue goes a long way towards making The Predator a fun romp on its way to its borderline incoherent, much-retooled climax. Predators, though, is arguably the only movie in the series to organically tease some themes from the Predator concept, rather than haphazardly laying on some generic bullshit about, say, found family, which is the tactic preferred by the generally entertaining Predator: Badlands. Throughout the series, the Predator has all the trappings of a movie monster, in the humanoid Universal Monsters sense, as opposed to a more animalistic creature, which is where the Alien series leans. This seems particularly clear in the AVP sub-series, where the Predators become de facto good guys simply because they can stop the senseless and potentially endless destruction of the Xenomorphs. The mainline Predator movies don’t always take much advantage of this, and that includes Predators, with its four towering foes that ultimately could be 10 or one. But the movie does bring out the classic monster-movie question of whether the humans may be the “real” monsters, or at least less distinct from their enemies than they might assume.
That movie doesn’t express this sentiment with much poetry, mind, but by having the Predators recruit killers from various walks of life, including an incognito serial killer, Antal’s movie succeeds in blurring that line between humanity and monstrosity. The movie’s willingness to complicate its human characters could just be a ploy to make some of their deaths easier. Regardless, it gives Predators some old-fashioned monster-movie contemplation of human nature, while Antal also shares some of McTiernan’s flair for jungle-set compositions of his delightfully overqualified cast. Give it a little more time for nostalgia to develop, and Predators might well continue to rise in estimation.
In the meantime, Dan Trachtenberg, the current franchise steward, has introduced more traditional likability into his live-action takes on the series. In Prey (2022) he and screenwriter Patrick Aison make the protagonist the scrappy, likable Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman in the early 18th century who yearns to prove herself as a hunter for her tribe and encounters a Predator who seems to be killing his way up the American food chain. It’s a brilliant back-to-basics move, maintaining a dynamic reminiscent of the first movie while flipping a few key elements. Prey also benefits greatly from Midthunder, who has enough presence in her wide eyes and steely determination to actually pull focus from a Predator in any given frame—though it doesn’t hurt that this one uses his cloaking device constantly, which feels particularly low opposite 17th-century technology. She’s the first human to really carry large stretches of a Predator movie solo since Arnold, and her relatively sparse supporting cast includes (as yet) zero future governors or filmmakers. Prey also confirms that Predator has become a woman-driven franchise—and again Alien Vs. Predator can take some credit for getting there first, aligning Sanaa Lathan’s character with a temporarily heroic Predator, who scars her face in a gesture of respect. From there, Munn’s Casey is a key figure in The Predator, and Midthunder brings it home in Prey.
It’s a counterintuitive move, and not just because of how closely the original is associated with Arnold-style machismo, or the nerd-bro fans who probably buy a lot of the merch. The somewhat vaginal design of the Predators’ iconic mouths makes them a natural opponent of BDE-infused actors—or the phallic-headed xenomorphs, for that matter—but as the series goes on, it’s less fixated on the Predator masks and the horrors they might hide. So while more female protagonists in the series downplay any weird, gnarly, battle-of-the-genitals subtext, this heroic diversity does compensate for the inevitable demystification of the Predator. This is no longer business that only the largest men can attend to.
It was only a matter of time before the Predators themselves received some of this shading in kind. Predator: Badlands (2025), despite a title that tantalizingly sounds like it might involve Old West Predators, complements Prey less directly. Instead of a young Comanche attempting to prove herself, Trachtenberg aligns our sympathies with Dek, a young Predator hoping to do the same. And, as if sensing my earlier complaint that maybe these movies go to the invisibility well too often, young Dek is not granted a cloaking device in his self-selected hunting of the Kalisk, the centerpiece of fearsomeness on the particularly deadly planet of Genna. So yes, amid a future-set environment that’s more Star Wars or Avatar than ever, Badlands succeeds in making a Predator into an actual character, albeit not a particularly original or interesting one. The movie hedges its bets by supplying Dek with a chatty robot sidekick/co-lead called Thia (Elle Fanning), who doesn’t quite count as a sop to the human audience, but allows Dek to brood and learn a generic lesson about self-respect or whatever. Still, after so many years without real characterization, Badlands manages an impressive feat by lending Dek any personality at all.
Trachtenberg comes from the J.J. Abrams school of geek-culture enthusiasm, which is less of a knock than it might sound like. It was easy to forgive The Force Awakens showing slavish faithfulness to the original Star Wars because Abrams populated it with likable characters and obviously loved both his new creations and the old movie—his exuberance expressed through momentum and lens flares rather than trivia. Trachtenberg has a similarly demonstrable enthusiasm for inventing and tweaking Predator lore—he wants us to call them Yautja so badly—that it becomes easy to excuse the franchise-extension exercise all of that lore entails. For example, Predator: Killer Of Killers (2025), his direct-to-Hulu animated anthology film with multiple eventual ties to the live-action films, is barely a real movie. It’s more akin to the direct-to-DVD Animatrix supplement that accompanied the Matrix sequels, only less varied, thoughtful, or altogether necessary to enrich the film series at hand. Its whole approach could be boiled down to the kind of half-pitch excitedly discussed in post-screening fan conversations: All throughout history, some dudes would fight and then, like, a Predator shows up. It’s endearing, though, that Trachtenberg revived the spirit of the 2000s to spin the kinds of Predator what-ifs that have been rattling around nerds’ heads for decades. (This is also why Alien Vs. Predator works, though Requiem is, as detailed elsewhere, hot garbage.)
It’s arguable that Trachtenberg’s enthusiasm is being used for the nefarious purposes of Disney taking horror-adjacent series like Alien and Predator and treating them more as off-season Star Wars substitutes whose past eclecticism failed to realize their full franchise potential. Yes, that kind of sucks, but maybe it’s not that much of a betrayal, particularly of Predator. Over the years, the series behaved less like the ruthless instincts of its bad guys (and now heroes?) than the improvisatory scramble of its victims. In that sense, the Predators getting revived more frequently, with continuities that can be referenced but resist being knit together, better aligns it with its monster-movie heritage alongside Dracula or Frankenstein’s Monster. Maybe the Predator is more Xenomorph-style resilient than once assumed. None of its follow-ups are Aliens-level classics, but Predators, The Predator, and Prey might be among the most enjoyably unrelated franchise entries of the 21st-century sequel-prequel void.
That’s not for lack of trying. Almost all of the Predator sequels have some kind of nod to other movies in the series. Much of it amounts to trivia. (Is Jake Busey playing the son of real-life dad Gary in The Predator? Does Louis Ozawa Changchien voice a character in Killer Of Killers because he’s supposed to be related to his yakuza character in Predators?!) Badlands hints that once again, some kind of Alien/Predator intersection may loom. They still make weirdly fitting opponents, though probably not for the reasons Disney thinks. The greater value of all this hunting is the opposite of the unruly survival seen in the Alien series, where it may yet turn into an untenable, repetitive sci-fi saga, but constantly threatens to evolve in some unplanned direction. Predator movies are unburdened by that particular threat, yet they’ve also been able to dodge the debris as other franchises collapse all around them. That’s not much like a predator, but it’s appropriate, though, for an ongoing survival story.
Final ranking:
1. Predator (1987)
2. Predators (2010)
3. Prey (2022)
4. Predator: Badlands (2025)
5. The Predator (2018)
6. Alien Vs. Predator (2004)
7. Predator 2 (1990)
8. Predator: Killer Of Killers (2025)
9. Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
