‘Predator Badlands’ Connection to ‘Alien’ Explained by the Director

Alien vs Predator was the kind of event movie that fifteen-year-old me was amped for. I couldn’t get inside the theater fast enough. Reviews be damned, I was there on Friday night, ready to watch these two titans finally square off on the big screen. My disappointment was immense. Part of that stemmed from the movie being rated PG-13, which isn’t inherently bad, but it meant kids were running up and down the aisles instead of paying attention. The other part of my disenchantment came from the film not being very good (so, in retrospect, I understand why the kids had more fun dicking around).

I finally rewatched it years later, when my kids were very young and I had to stay up all night with one of them. Yes, I was thoroughly sleep-deprived, but I had more fun than the first time. The story ain’t great, but the setting and setup are fun, and there’s still some exciting action. There’s something inherently thrilling about movie-character crossovers. That’s why people have been doing them for almost a century. They aren’t always successful, but people clamor for them. So, you give the people what they want. That’s what Dan Trachtenberg is doing.

Trachtenberg already has a successful foray into the Predator universe with Prey, which was released in 2022. That film features one of the alien trophy hunters going toe-to-toe with a Comanche warrior in the early 1700s. It rules. It’s something I would have much rather seen in a theater, but I couldn’t as it was dropped straight on Hulu, for obvious reasons that I don’t feel like discussing right now. The film gave us a fresh take on the franchise, and now Trachtenberg is going back… to the future (that was so satisfying to write).

His next film, which will be in theaters, is Predator Badlands. Set in the not-too-distant future, Badlands will tell the story of a young Predator cast from their clan and looking for the next big kill. It looks so goddamn good. I would have been excited anyway, but the trailer is exquisite. It’s also being released in November, so they must be going for a big Oscar push (just joking, but also maybe not?). While we’ll have to wait to see how the film shakes out, we’ve already gotten teases that it may connect to some other films.

That’s right, early on, we get a shot of a skull trophy room, and one of them looks like the aliens from Independence Day! That’s what you came here for, right? Connections to ID4? No? Hold on.

Oh, right, Weyland-Yutani! The futuristic company is an integral part of the Alien universe. So, in the trailer for Badlands, when Elle Fanning’s eyes went white to reveal the company’s logo, people noticed. “I always wanted no humans in this movie,” Dan Trachtenberg recently said to Empire. “So I thought it might be fun to have the Predator with a robot. Then I thought, ‘I know a company that makes robots…’” A little tease like that is more than enough to get my motor going, and probably much easier to work in from a narrative standpoint than, say, Predators dropping Xenomorphs on Earth with the express purpose of hunting them (though I don’t hate that).

The director also teased that the young Predator in the new film will have a connection with Fanning’s Weyland-Yutani-built android. “A fun, mismatched pairing”, Trachtenberg noted. “One talkative, one laconic. As exciting and violent as this movie is, the character stuff really pops, too.” It’s a fun way to get at a crossover, and hell, the connections may not end there. But if they did, I wouldn’t be too mad. Trachtenberg knows what he’s talking about! Trachtenberg knows what he’s doing!