Predators Writer Reveals Wild Plan for Unmade Sequel Trilogy

In the summer of 2010, Fox attempted to revamp the iconic Predator franchise with the aptly-titled Predators (now streaming on Peacock). Molded in the vein of the 1987 original, the 2010 film directed by Nimród Antal made one major tweak to the well-worn formula.

Rather than have the Predators come to Earth to hunt humans, the humans were brought directly to the Predators. A pack of dangerous individuals — from a black ops mercenary (recent Golden Globe-winner Adrian Brody), to a member of the Yakuza (Louis Ozawa), to a convicted death row felon (Walton Goggins), to a literal serial killer (Topher Grace) — are unceremoniously abducted and dropped into a remote game reserve somewhere in the cosmos.

Predators screenwriter Michael Finch on expanding the canon

“We wanted to flip the paradigm a little bit … and we desperately wanted to expand the canon,” Michael Finch, who co-wrote the movie with Alex Litvak and, more recently, penned John Wick: Chapter 4 alongside Shay Hatten, tells SYFY WIRE over Zoom. “It had sort of gotten stuck in a death spiral a little bit. They come to Earth, you don’t really learn anything particularly new about them. It’s not the story, it’s not the characters, it’s just now, ‘Can the filmmakers make the kills more gruesome and interesting?’ It became base horror and we wanted to do something a little bit different.”

Finch and Litvak’s new addition to the lore came in the form of “a civil war going on between Super Predators and these ordinary Predators,” Finch notes. While they were able to touch on this narrative thread a little bit in the film, budgetary restrictions precluded the production — which had Robert Rodriguez on board as producer — from moving forward on the screenplay’s original climax in outer space, featuring “a battle … or big firefight.” Undeterred, however, the two writers tackled a significant rewrite over the course of a single day, adding in the character of Noland (played by a wonderfully unhinged Laurence Fishburne), who has survived on the reserve for years, losing his sanity in the process.

Another unrealized hope was to have Arnold Schwarzenegger reprise his role as Dutch and kick off a trilogy of films that would have culminated in a visit to the Predators’ planet of origin.

Predators writer details plans for unmade Predator franchise trilogy

Per Finch, the team really wanted Schwarzenegger to make an MCU-style cameo right after Royce (Brody) beheads the Super Predator in hand-to-hand combat. “A ship lands, smoke comes out, Predators start walking out, you’re entirely f***ed. You don’t have a chance, you’re out of ammunition, you’re bleeding, you’ve got a stick in your hand. These guys are coming out, the smoke clears, [one of them] pulls off his helmet and it’s Schwarzenegger. He’s part of that clan now … By virtue of the fact that he had beaten this Predator [in the first movie], he’d become very interesting to the Predators and he had been taken and become one of them, essentially.”

Unfortunately, the mythical action star was too busy serving as Governor of California at the time and the plan never gained much momentum. Nevertheless, Finch and Litvak still had big plans for the next two installments, the second of which was going to take place on a mothership orbiting the atmosphere above the game reserve. “The only way to [escape] is to fight their way out, so they have to take control of the ship,” Finch continues. “It was gonna be in space and keep expanding the lore of the Predators in general and start establishing a clan structure … From the outside, they appear to be the same, but their attitudes and cultures are very different from the inside.”

The third entry would have brought audiences to the Predator homeworld (briefly glimpsed three years earlier in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem). “We never really got there, but we were thinking of modeling it on [ancient] Rome [with] gladiatorial combat, internecine warfare, native clans on the outside, and more established ones on the inside,” Finch says. “Mostly, we wanted to show a civilization that was crumbling under its own weight a little bit. They had evolved so far … they’d conquered everything in a weird way and were sort of collapsing under their own weight.”

What’s more, we’d learn that the “Super Predators” were juicing themselves with the genes from the most badass species across the universe — a concept that would come into play nearly a decade later in Shane Black’s The Predator. “They pick and choose the baddest opponents that they can kind and if they’re worthy, they take their DNA, separate those things that make them dangerous, and implant them in their own DNA to improve themselves,” Finch reveals. “The idea was that there had been a dramatic escalation in Predator evolution through science and that there were gonna be side effects of that. It’s be careful what you wish for in a sense.”

Despite the fact that Predators went on to become the second-highest grossing title in the franchise up to that point, Fox never green-lit a sequel based on the tepid critical reception. Finch partially chalks this lukewarm response up to fans feeling burned after a pair of less-than-stellar follow-ups centered around the universe’s greatest hunter. As such, they felt particularly protective and reverent of the ’87 original.

“We were still functioning under the paradigm of, ‘Let’s take the existing world — the existing look, feel, sense and sensibility,” the screenwriter concludes. “I think [our movie] wasn’t loved because it was not a true reimagination and it was coming on the heels of some pretty obvious cash grabs on the sum of the previous [sequels].”

“To their credit, Fox [now 20th Century Studios under Disney’s ownership] took that paradigm, threw it out the window [with 2022’s Prey] and basically said, ‘Look, we can’t win by trying to remake a version of the original, so let’s do something entirely different,’ which I think was a really, really smart idea. It also indicates a path forward for a lot of IP that’s gotten kicked around and beat down a little beat. We need to take these beloved titles and reimagine them … Where we were trying to build bigger and bigger films, they are going smaller and smaller in a sense, which is very smart. It’s cost effective, it’s dynamic, it’s different, it’s not derivative. Ours was an homage. We were trying to stay true to the spirit of the original [while Disney has] moved away from that very nicely.”

Predators is now streaming on Peacock alongside Predator and Alien vs. Predator.