A Secret “Predator” Movie is Coming Out Next Year
We already knew that a new Predator film was headed our way—Predator: Badlands—the sequel to 2022’s Dan Trachtenberg’s hit Prey. But now, thanks to a conversation between 20th Century Studio Boss Steve Asbell and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit, we now know there’s a secret, additional Predator film lurking on the 2025 release schedule.
Asbell revealed that after the success of Trachtenberg’s Prey, the director wasn’t interested in doing a Prey 2. So, Trachtenberg pitched 20th Century Studio “a bunch of ideas that were really crazy but really cool,” Asbell said. “We’ve actually done two of them. Two are coming out next year. One I can’t talk about yet, but the other is the live-action Predator film with Elle Fanning that just wrapped in New Zealand. That’ll be out theatrically sometime next year.”
Elle Fanning is starring in Badlands, a movie that Asbell says is “an absolute bonkers idea. It is a sci-fi thing, but it’s not what everybody thinks it is. And I mean, it’s awesome. It is so nuts. But in Dan, we trust.” But Asbell’s reveal to THR that Trachtenberg directed the second secret Predator film, too, is news to everyone. Badlands was already on the schedule with a November 7, 2025 release, and Asbell said the secret Predator Trachtenberg also directed would come out before, so that presumably means direct-to-streaming on Hulu. There’s no information out there about what this mysterious film will be about, but considering Prey was a self-contained period piece set 300 years before any previous Predator, we can guess that the new mystery film will have its own, separate time and place. Prey was delightful for just how different it felt from previous Predators, yet how it connected to the original 1987 film in the brutal simplicity of its setting. In the original, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch is a part of a commando team that gets slaughtered, one by one, by a Predator in a Central American jungle, until it’s just Dutch versus the Predator. In Prey, a young Comanche woman played by Amber Midthunder is pitted against Predator on Comanche Nation land in the Northern Great Plains in 1719.
Badlands is reportedly not set in the past but will take place sometime in the future, and it just wrapped filming in New Zealand. Now, all we know about this mysterious third Trachtenberg film is that it exists, but given his track record, we can make an educated guess that it will be set entirely apart from the other two films.
When asked if there would be a new Alien vs. Predator film, a monster crossover that’s happened a number of times over the years, Asbell didn’t rule it out but admitted to no concrete plans.
“It wouldn’t be in the way you think. That’s the thing. Not in the way that it will just be called Alien vs. Predator or anything like the original movies. If we do this, they’ll be organically created out of these two franchises that we’ve continued with characters that we fall in love with and those characters will combine…perhaps.”
We’ll keep you posted when we learn more about Badlands and this mysterious other Predator project. For now, you can stream Prey on Hulu.
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Featured image: The Predator (Dane DiLiegro), shown. (Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios.)
