A Predator movie directed by Shane Black, written by him and the director of The Monster Squad. This sounded like the recipe for an awesome sci-fi action horror film, but what Black delivered was one of the least popular films in the Predator franchise, with a third act that was completely different from what was originally written and a variety of bad ideas being filmed as potential endings. Critics were unimpressed. Fans were disappointed. And now, we’re going to dig into what happened to The Predator.
1987 was a huge year for Shane Black. His original screenplay Lethal Weapon was turned into an action classic by director Richard Donner. His friend, director Fred Dekker, brought their script for the creature feature The Monster Squad to the screen, creating a film that is now considered to be a cult classic. And he was cast alongside the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, and other iconic tough guys in Predator. Director John McTiernan and the producers hoped Black would do some on-set revisions to the script by Jim and John Thomas, but while he did come up with some of the jokes his character tells, he didn’t do any substantial rewrites. And the script didn’t need it. Predator was another instant classic.
As years went by, Black would write the likes of The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. He made his directing debut with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, which paved the way for him to direct Iron Man 3 in 2013. And the year after Iron Man 3 made a billion dollars at the box office, it was announced that Black was going back to his roots. He would be directing the next sequel in the Predator franchise, a film called The Predator, and he was writing the script with his Monster Squad co-writer Fred Dekker. It took a few years for the project to go into production. Black and Dekker worked on a Western TV movie called Edge first, then Black made the action comedy The Nice Guys. But The Predator started filming in early 2017… and while things seemed to go smoothly at first, there was trouble ahead.
The original Predator established that the title aliens visit Earth regularly, going to hot locations to hunt humans. They have a code of honor, as they will only kill someone who is armed. Then they rip out spines and skulls to collect as trophies. But Black and Dekker didn’t want to make another simple, straightforward “hunting humans” movie. As Black told Empire, their approach was to “event-ize the Predator again. Make it more mysterious. The Predator has been so overdone. Every couple of years, there’s a knock-off churned out. Very low budget with a guaranteed return.” With this film, they aimed to achieve “the same sense of wonderment and newness that Close Encounters of the Third Kind had when that came out.”
The first actor to sign on was Benicio del Toro, who would be playing U.S. Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna. But del Toro soon had to drop out due to scheduling issues, and was replaced by Boyd Holbrook. Sterling K. Brown was cast as government agent Will Traeger, with Olivia Munn as evolutionary biologist Casey Brackett, Jacob Tremblay as McKenna’s autistic son Rory, who has a surprisingly large role in the film, Yvonne Strahovski as McKenna’s estranged wife, and Trevante Rhodes, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, and Augusto Aguilera as a group the film refers to as The Loonies. Stuntmen Brian A. Prince and Kyle Strauts were chosen to play the film’s Predators. Jake Busey shows up as the son of the character his father Gary Busey played in Predator 2. Watch closely and you might also spot Françoise Yip as her Alien vs. Predator: Requiem character Yutani. Unfortunately, her dialogue was cut.
Black had hoped to get Arnold Schwarzenegger to cameo at the end of the film as his Predator character Dutch Schaefer, but Arnie wasn’t interested. As he told Yahoo, “They asked me, and I read it, and I didn’t like it, whatever they offered. So I’m not going to do that.” The same thing had happened when the makers of the film Predators had tried to get Arnie to show up as Dutch. He doesn’t want to cameo in a Predator movie, he wants to be given a more substantial role. So that idea was off the table.
Black and Dekker wrote a story that a studio executive described as “unexpected and utterly fresh.” It begins with a Predator ship crash-landing on Earth. Quinn McKenna encounters the alien while on a mission and ends up stealing the alien’s gear, shipping its helmet and wrist gauntlet back to the States right before he’s captured by Traeger, who’s working on Project Stargazer, which has been tracking Predator activity for years. The incapacitated Predator is taken to Stargazer headquarters, and Casey Brackett is brought in to examine the creature. But things don’t go well. The Predator regains consciousness, kills a lot of people, and escapes from the base. Meanwhile, Traeger has made sure that McKenna is deemed crazy for talking about aliens. He ends up in a bus containing a group of combat veterans with PTSD. They’re called The Loonies. As the Predator escapes from Stargazer, the Loonies get caught up in the action.
Also caught up in the situation is McKenna’s son Rory, who has received the Predator gear, deciphered the alien language, learned how to work the wrist gauntlet, and goes trick-or-treating wearing the Predator’s helmet. The Loonies, Brackett, and Rory go on the run with Traeger’s team, the Predator, and Predator Hounds on their trail. And here’s where things really start to get weird. The film tells us that Predators don’t just collect spines and skulls. They also harvest DNA from their prey and use it for gene therapy in an attempt to enhance themselves. We see the result when a hulking beast called the Upgrade Predator shows up and kills the other Predator. A CGI creation, the Upgrade is eleven feet tall with bulletproof skin and tech implants. The other Predator, the Fugitive, got on its bad side by stealing cargo… and the cargo in the film is very different from what Black and Dekker originally envisioned.
After poor test screenings, the studio ordered that the entire third act of the movie had to be reworked. As written and filmed, the original ending was an action sequence that took place during the day and saw a bunch of monstrous creatures, Predator hybrids, being released from the crashed ship. The Loonies are picked up by General Woodhurst, played by Edward James Olmos, and taken to a military base that’s set up to research the Predator visitations and a potential upcoming invasion. Two defector Predators are working at the base as consultants, and they join the Loonies in the fight against the hybrids and the Upgrade Predator. Photos taken during the filming of this sequence even made their way online during production. But the hybrids, the friendly Predators, and General Woodhurst were all cut from the film entirely.
Reshoots moved the action to nighttime, so Black suggested that the studio should release both versions of the film on home video. Call the original Predator A.M. and the reshot version Predator P.M. But the studio didn’t go for that idea because they didn’t want to pay to finish the hybrid special effects, so all we get to see are the reshoots, where the Upgrade Predator hunts characters in a dark woods and reveals that it is intensely interested in Rory because it sees his autism as an advancement in human evolution. Of course, things don’t work out for Upgrade, and the survivors get to find out what the Fugitive’s stolen cargo was.
The cargo was supposed to be the hybrids. Now Black had to figure out what to replace them with. A few options were filmed, with the idea being that the cargo should be something that could help Earth fend off a Predator invasion. How about someone from the Alien franchise? Stuntwoman Breanna Watkins emerged from a cryostasis tube as Alien heroine Ellen Ripley in one version of the ending and an adult version of Newt from Aliens in another version. Yes, time travel was involved. Those were both silly ideas, but so was the one that ended up in the movie, which seems to be inspired by Black’s Iron Man work. The cargo is a hi-tech suit called the Predator Killer, and McKenna looks forward to wearing it during his next encounter with the Predators. Which we’ll never see, because The Predator was not well-received.
The film was aiming for an early 2018 theatrical release, but got pushed back to September due to the rewrites and reshoots. Many fans saw that as reason to be concerned. And around the time of release, The Predator got some extra bad press when it was revealed that Olivia Munn had demanded a scene be cut from the film when she found out her scene partner was a registered sex offender. But, it was just a scene involving a jogger hitting on her character. Easy to remove. It sounds like something that should have been destined for the cutting room floor anyway.
When the film reached theatres, a lot of fans and critics were disappointed. Only thirty-four percent of the reviews collected on Rotten Tomatoes are positive, and the audience score is even less positive, at thirty-two percent. Made on a budget of eighty-eight million dollars, The Predator ended up drawing in one hundred and sixty million at the box office. A higher amount than other Predator movies had earned, but Black and the studio were looking to hit a better number than that.
The Predator has its moments. The characters are fun and likeable, and there’s some cool action in there. But it’s an odd, goofy entry in the franchise, and it’s packed with questionable decisions. The DNA harvesting and gene splicing, the Upgrade Predator, the Predator Killer suit, the idea that the Predators might launch a full-scale invasion of the planet… None of this ever needed to be part of a Predator sequel.
During an interview on the Postmortem podcast, Black admitted that he and Dekker did not have their fingers on the pulse when coming up with The Predator. He said, “I’ll take the hits for whatever I did wrong on that. I just didn’t make the Predator movie that people wanted to see, apparently. I’m not going to take the road of blaming anyone – including the studio – for a failed movie. We tried something different. We were making a Halloween drive-in movie. Not just a drive-in movie – one you go to on Halloween when you were a kid. The Predator had such a rock-solid fan base of people expecting that sort of solemn and almost reverential approach to this myth. The mythic quality of the Predator is what people seem to respond to, so chalk it up as we tried something, and in some people’s eyes, we made the wrong movie. We filmed the wrong script, for what they would have preferred. I’m okay with that, and own any and all mistakes made on the film.”
Things didn’t go well with The Predator, but the franchise would continue, and it quickly went back to the basics. The next installment, Prey, returned to the simple “hunting humans and taking trophies” scenario… which, as it turns out, is exactly what the audience was waiting to see.
A couple of the previous episodes of the show can be seen below. To see more, head over to our JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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