Badlands Is Full of Skulls and Snarls

Fans of the long-running Predator series were delighted by the news that Dan Trachtenberg—who made 2022’s Prey, which brought a fresh jolt of energy to the franchise—would be continuing to steer the ship with not one, but two new movies. One is live-action adventure thriller Predator: Badlands, and the other is an until-now mysterious animated feature.

Today at CinemaCon’s Disney presentation unfortunately didn’t reveal anything about the animated film, but we’ve now got more to go on with Predator: Badlands. In addition to presenting creatures that are bigger, grosser, and have much cooler high-tech weapons than anything we’ve seen from the series before, Badlands will pose a surprising question: what if the Predator, ruthless intergalactic big-game hunter, was actually… the good guy?

“Something unpredicented happens in this movie,” Badlands star Elle Fanning told the CinemaCon audience. “My character teams up with the Predator and you see him in a new light.”

The first footage unfolded as follows:

A lair filled with skulls. Elle Fanning’s voice: “I didn’t think you survived.” We’re on some kind of alien planet. Vast landscapes, barren, and a spaceship flies into frame.

“The deadliest hunter returns to the big screen,” the trailer says. The predator walks on a mountain, Fanning’s character has white eyes that kind of roll back into her head. Everything on the planet is alien. The plants, the creatures, everything.

The trailer describes this as “a planet of hurt” and we see the Predator himself being hunted. We thought Predators were bad but they’re nothing compared to these creatures. They’re bigger. Grosser. “You’re hunting something that can’t be killed,” Fanning’s character says.

We see the main character Predator standing mid frame, his hair pulled back into almost a pony tail, and he does that classic snarl with all four fangs. We then see what he’s snarling at. A massive, massive beast that starts jumping into the frame.

Predator: Badlands hits theaters November 7.

Additional reporting by Germain Lussier.

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