Fred Dekker, director of The Monster Squad and Robocop 3, is co-writing Shane Black‘s The Predator, and via EW, he dropped some recent hints on Adam Green’s podcast as to where the story might go.
“If you think of the first Predator as Alien, ours is much more Aliens,†Dekker told filmmaker Adam Green (Hatchet) on the latest episode of the Movie Crypt podcast. “It’s not Ten Little Indians, it’s not, let’s kill off all of our characters.”
Interesting quote, in a couple of regards. Firstly, if Predator was analogous to Alien, shouldn’t Predators be the version of Aliens? While that movie seems not to have had much of a lasting impact, it was reasonably successful and well liked when it came out, and it launched NECA’s current, seemingly endless line of Predator action figures.
Secondly, most Alien and Predator movies, including Prometheus and, yes, Aliens, are about the primary characters dying off one by one. The only movies where this wasn’t so much the case were Predator 2, set in a city, and AVP: Requiem, set in a small town. This is probably because they were the only two not set in confined, isolated locations.
Which brings us to the second part of Dekker’s quote:
“We have a lot of characters, from a lot of different worlds and ideologies. I don’t mean other planets. It’s a lot of people doing a lot of things in a lot of locations.”
“A lot of locations” is the interesting part. When we’ve seen the yautja (that’s the geeky, in-continuity name for the creatures commonly known as Predators) previously, they have usually been on one-and-done hunting missions, and they tend to lose. Given that the movie title implies a singular creature, could it have a much more involved mission this time…and be significantly more successful? And will the Predators subplot about a civil war between newer and older Preds continue, or be dropped and forgotten? Civil wars are kinda hot right now at the box office, we hear.
It sounds like the dreadlocked destroyer will have a whole bunch of opponents, anyway. What would you like to see on this hunt? Show yourself in comments below.
featured image: 20th Century Fox
