Predator Badlands, a secret Aliens movie? (trailer)
Just when you thought the galaxy had run out of ways to say “Get to the chopper!”, the Predator franchise has donned its invisibility cloak once more and crept back into the tall grass—except this time, the grass is probably glowing, swaying on an alien planet, and has a Weyland-Yutani logo stamped on every blade.
Yes, friends, Predator: Badlands is coming for us all this November 2025, and based on its new teaser trailer and the tantalising intel dripping out of San Diego Comic-Con like green glowing blood, it might just be the boldest Yautja yarn yet.
Directed by Dan Trachtenberg—he of Prey fame and apparently a man on a one-man mission to salvage the franchise from the “Versus” years—Badlands takes a wildly different approach. For the first time, our titular Predator isn’t the boogeyman. He’s the underdog. Meet Dek: a young runt of a Predator, cast out by his clan like a Xenomorph on bring-your-facehugger-to-work day. Teaming up with an android called Thia (played by Elle Fanning, who radiates eerie calm and possibly murder), the pair venture across a strange new world in search of… the ultimate adversary.
What could that be? Well, if you squint very hard at the teaser—and who among us hasn’t rewatched this thing frame-by-frame—you might notice a few intriguing skulls on display in Dek’s murder-mantel. One of them, we kid you not, appears to belong to an alien from Independence Day. Cheeky Easter egg? Or a sign that Roland Emmerich’s universe just got silently annexed by the Alien/Predator extended cinematic mythos? Either way, we approve. At SFcrowsnest, this is exactly the kind of cross-pollination chaos we live for.
And then there’s Thia. Oh, Thia. She’s not just your standard pretty-in-plasma-spacebot—she’s a full-on Weyland-Yutani creation. That’s right. Badlands is doing the thing we hoped and feared: yoking the cursed megacorp from Alien lore into the Predatorverse. The teaser makes it abundantly clear with cybernetic eye-rolls and the sort of branding placement only a legally dubious sci-fi merger could produce.
Which raises the tantalising question: is Badlands actually the third Alien vs. Predator film in disguise? No official word, of course—Disney’s lawyers probably detonate if someone says “AvP” out loud—but the signs are there. Literally. On trucks. On eyeballs. And possibly buried under a tarp somewhere in the trailer, waiting to burst forth with acid-for-blood fan service.
Beyond the crossover bait, there’s real artistry going on here. Trachtenberg has cited influences ranging from Frank Frazetta’s heavy-metal pulp aesthetics to the quiet existential dread of Terrence Malick. Throw in nods to Shane, Mad Max 2, The Book of Eli, and the haunting majesty of Shadow of the Colossus, and you’re left with something less like Predator 7: Bigger Teeth Edition and more like a mythic space western about honour, exile, and, well, gory interspecies conflict.
Studio Gillis and Wētā Workshop are handling the practical effects, which means Dek looks less like a bloke in a rubber suit and more like a tragic warrior-poet who could still rip your spine out through your chest if provoked. And if that’s not the emotional complexity we’ve all been begging for in our murderous alien hunters, I don’t know what is.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we’re cautiously optimistic. Badlands looks poised to blend the best of Predator‘s blood-spattered DNA with the moody operatics of modern sci-fi. It’s a bold experiment—giving the monster a heart, giving the android a soul, and giving us a cinematic sandbox that might, just might, be big enough to contain a xenomorph or two. Surprise or not, if one of those sleek, biomechanical nightmares shows up halfway through Badlands, we’ll be in the back row of the cinema, quietly screaming “F**k yeah!” into our popcorn.
Just don’t call it AvP 3. Not yet. Not until the cloaked figure shows up with the shoulder cannon humming. Then you can start sharpening your tail-blades.
