Copyright CinemaBlend
In the last three years, the Alien/Predator franchise has been as active as any in modern Hollywood. Audiences have seen three new movies (Prey, Alien: Romulus, Predator: Killer Of Killers) and a new TV series (Alien: Earth), and we’ll be treated to the arrival of Predator: Badlands in theaters everywhere. Needless to say, it’s a fertile time for the canon, and while the stories are pretty disparate, it can be said that there is some cool sharing of ideas coming out of the overlapping production/release schedules. I asked about filmmaker collaboration this past weekend when I interviewed director Dan Trachtenberg at the Los Angeles press day for Predator: Badlands – he having contributed majorly already to the franchise by helming Prey and Predator: Killer Of Killers. He started by saying that there wasn’t really any communication at all between the various projects (despite the fact that he is friendly with Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez), but that was principally because it wasn’t something that was necessary for the story that he was telling. Trachtenberg explained, Predator: Badlands not only takes place further into the future than any previous story told in the continuity, but it takes place on alien worlds far from Earth and doesn’t even feature any human characters. That being said, it does make the biggest moves since the release of Alien vs. Predator: Requiem in 2007 to fuse the canons of the Alien and Predator movies. Specifically, while it doesn’t have any human characters, what it does have are Weyland-Yutani synths. This is where the aforementioned sharing of ideas comes in. Predator: Badlands was in production in the middle of last year, and the timing happened to coincide with the theatrical release of Alien: Romulus. When Dan Trachtenberg and members of his crew saw scenes featuring Andy (David Jonsson) with the Weyland-Yutani logo in his eyes, they immediately saw potential: The end result are moments in Predator: Badlands when Elle Fanning’s Thia goes into a kind of standby mode and her eyes look just like Andy’s in Alien: Romulus: But what about Alien: Earth? The Noah Hawley-created series completed the run of its eight-episode first season in September, but it finished filming before the start of principal photography on Predator: Badlands. Again, the two projects occupy very distant points on the canon timeline, but Hawley did reach out to Dan Trachtenberg and gave him a special preview of what he was cooking up: In everything we’ve seen in the last three years, there is a lot of great storytelling and a lot of potential for the future established – but the immediate present is delivering us the badassness of Predator: Badlands. Starring newcomer Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi as a runt member of the Yautja species who has to prove himself worthy of his people’s warrior culture, the film arrives in theaters everywhere this Friday, November 7.
