Predator: Badlands Director Reveals His Original Intent To Have Predator Fighting Nazis In World War 2

Predator: Badlands is out this weekend, and it’s getting mixed reviews from an audience unsure what to expect from the film or the franchise at this point. Now, director Dan Trachtenberg reveals that he originally wanted the film to be about Predator fighting Nazis in World War II.

Hollywood only has a couple of playbooks for making a film after their social justice takeover: replace a character with a strong, female lead, and make the villains literal Nazis. It’s almost as if they have no concept that any other event happened in history other than their romanticization of World War 2, a concept that’s gotten so absurd that one wonders if they’re taking their fantasies about fighting Nazis a little too seriously.

Predator as a franchise already has an identity crisis. Outside of the first film and Alien vs. Predator, there’s not much to the monster sci-fi flick. It became worse when Hulu released Prey in 2022, giving in to some of the worst of Hollywood tropes.

Prey received criticism for being a girlboss-style film. Critics and viewers argued that the protagonist Naru’s victory over the Predator felt reliant on tropes of feminist empowerment, where the character is presented as a self-made hero overcoming male dominance, but with little meaningful character development beyond that.

Now, with Predator: Badlands, early reviews are saying much the same, with a “buddy cop” style movie of Predator teaming up with a strong female lead.

It’s much the same as the rest of Hollywood, but apparently, early iterations of this Predator film, which does not follow up on the 2022 Prey at all, had much worse generic Hollywood tropes to it.

In an interview with Direct, the director Dan Trachtenberg revealed that isntead of having an alien planet for Predator: Badlands, the first iteration of this film would have leaned into some of the most annoying historical concepts overplayed in everything Hollywood produces.

“The very first nugget of the idea was, what if the Predator wins? And I just really didn’t want it to be a slasher movie where the slasher wins, I really wanted you to root for the guy,” said Trachtenberg. “Then, in rooting for it, I was like, Well, I guess he could be, like, set in WWII, and he’s kicking Nazi butt or something. But, even then, I felt like that’s not really a special new movie. And then it became, wait a second, what if he’s really the protagonist of his own story, and I get people to really root for him on his own journey, his own adventure.”

Trachtenberg also commented on the current Predator having a softer, more accessible design than the original. . “Usually, the Yautja’s costuming is done just by the creature designers,” he said. “This is the first time we really had someone who’s like the costume department, a true artist of that specific craft is designing their wardrobe and some early designs felt like a little too medieval and too Earthbound, and really tried to find something that spoke to, and was a little bit more Spartan, since their culture is so hardcore, and also that was A little bit more like Conan Barbarian nomad, nomadic culture.”

The idea is to get the audience to empathize with the Predator, keeping with Hollywood trends of making bad characters good that never bodes well for films.

Are you planning on seeing Predator: Badlands?

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