Badlands’ Wants to be a Relationship Story

As the current steward of the Predator franchise, director Dan Trachtenberg seems very conscious of not repeating himself. While fans are still holding out hope for Prey 2, there can be no complaints about the shortage of new material in the Predator universe. We already got the animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers earlier this year, and there’ll be a whole new flavor of sci-fi survival coming in November’s Predator: Badlands.

In a new interview with Empire, Trachtenberg teased just how different Badlands is going to be. We already knew that the Predator itself will be the hero of this tale, with an assist from an android character crafted by another familiar sci-fi stalwart (Alien‘s sinister megacorp Weyland-Yutani) played by Elle Fanning. But the nature of their pairing sounds… surprising, to say the least.

“In general, I’m always looking for: what could happen only in this movie?” Trachtenberg explained to Empire.

He calls the end result “a kind of buddy-comedy,” thanks to the duo of Dek (the Predator—yes, it has a name!) and Thia (Fanning’s synthetic character). “Prey was a solo survival tale; this is a relationship story.”

It is also, of course, a “crazy adventure against monsters and the elements—only this time it’s a badass Predator against those things. We wanted Dek to be relatable, but without turning him into Luke Skywalker. He’s still a Predator—we had to allow him to be a dick. But a dick you can root for.”

We can’t wait to see how it all comes together when Predator: Badlands arrives November 7.

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