Fans of the Predator franchise are already having a fantastic week but it’s about to get much, much better. Days after Disney officially announced that the next film in the franchise, Predator: Badlands, will be coming to theaters next year, a Fox executive teased that a second film is also coming out next year. And, they may eventually take on Alien once again too.
“After Prey became a success, [that film’s director] Dan [Trachtenberg] came back and said he didn’t want to do Prey 2. And we’re like, ‘What do you want to do?’” 20th Century Studios president Steve Asbel told the Hollywood Reporter. “And he rattled off a bunch of ideas that were really crazy but really cool. We’ve actually done two of them. Two are coming out next year. One I can’t talk about yet, but the other one is the live-action Predator film with Elle Fanning that just wrapped in New Zealand. That’ll be out theatrically sometime next year.”
When pressed about what this second movie is, Asbel wouldn’t budge. “There’s a second Predator movie that we have different plans for. Dan has actually directed both,” Asbel said. “There’s a secret Predator movie that will come out before the theatrical one but I can’t say anything about [it] yet.”
What he can say a bit more about is Badlands. “Badlands… is an absolutely bonkers idea,” Asbel said. “It is a sci-fi thing, but it’s not what everybody thinks it is. And I mean, it’s awesome. It is so nuts. But in Dan, we trust.”
So, what the heck is he talking about? The fact Asbel said “the other one is the live-action Predator film” leads some to believe that the second film is some kind of animated project. io9 reached out to the director who, understandably, would not comment. He did, however, offer this winky face emoji tease on social media so feel free to speculate wildly below.
From there, the studio president also admitted that a) a sequel to Alien: Romulus following Rain and Andy (Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson) is in the works from Fede Alvarez, and b) a future Alien vs. Predator movie is probably going to happen at some point. “It wouldn’t be in the way you think. That’s the thing,” Asbel said about AvP. “Not in the way that it will just be called Alien vs. Predator or anything like the original movies. If we do this, they’ll be organically created out of these two franchises that we’ve continued with characters that we fall in love with and those characters will combine… perhaps. But we haven’t gotten to that point. And we’re not just going to bang it out.”
It sounds like fans of not just Predator but Alien too will be eating well over the next few years. Head over to the Hollywood Reporter to read much more about what’s coming at 20th Century Fox.
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