Predator: Badlands, Dan Trachtenberg’s upcoming action movie set in the Predator universe, won’t be R-rated. But, its creators hope, it will feel like an R regardless. Here's why.
IGN visited the set of Predator: Badlands, and returned armed with 12 Things We Learned. One of them is that the film won’t be R-rated, but will still be very violent.
The Predator movies and related spinoffs are famous for their gore. The iconic first movie, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, featured copious amounts of blood and guts, a healthy dollop of dismemberment, and even a poor man with his chest blown out by a blast from the Predator’s shoulder cannon. Then there’s all the corpse shots. Yum.
Predator 2 kept the gore coming, with people speared, gutted, skinned alive and left hanging from the rafters. One person is even cut in half. Even Trachtenberg’s well-received Prey and animated spinoff Predator: Killer of Killers were rated R with good reason, too.
So, Predator: Badlands is the first Predator movie since 2004’s AvP1 to receive a PG-13. But why? Producer Ben Rosenblatt told IGN that Predator: Badlands gets away with a hopefully audience-swelling PG-13 rating while maintaining the series’ trademark violence because it focuses on synthetics, the Yautja (the name of the race of aliens who assume the Predator role), and various other monsters, rather than humans. Indeed, not a single human character is hurt during the movie.
“We'll see where it ends up, but our hope for it is that it can be a PG-13 that feels like an R,” Rosenblatt said. “That's kind of our hope. And really, what that's about is just being able to broaden out the audience for a movie like this.”
“We don't have any humans in the movie and so we don't have any human red blood,” Rosenblatt continued. “So we're hoping that's gonna play to our advantage. We're going to go as hard as we possibly can within those constraints, and we think we'll be able to do some pretty awesomely gruesome stuff. But in colours other than red.”
What that means is we’ll see plenty of the green blood from the Yautja and the milky substance that pours out of the synths from the Alien universe, but no red human blood.
The reaction to the confirmation is mixed from fans. “This sounded amazing and it'll probably still be, I love Prey and the same team is behind it, but then I got to the part where it's not going to be rated R; my hype meter went down a few notches,” said IGN reader ducets4donuts. “I still hope it's great, though.”
“I’m with you, and I know sometimes you have to make sacrifices to get a budget, buuuut if there’s not humans, they can have a lot of violence against creatures and robots without needing the R rating,” added yakitysmakity.
Over on reddit there was a similar mixed reaction. “I’m just concerned that they’ll push my favorite franchise towards the Jurassic World direction,” said jungledreams21. “Something that was meant to be dark and brutal turned goofy.”
“Considering it’s robots and aliens that’s understandable, but this better not become a standard for future entries,” added South_Buy_3175. “Predator is an adult franchise, it should be shown as such.” Thatoneguy111700 declared: “A higher rating does not a good movie make.”
Some are giving director Trachtenberg the benefit of the doubt, given his great work reviving the franchise in the first place with 2022’s Prey and then Killer of Killers. “As others have pointed out, knowing that the violence is largely going to be against aliens, monsters, and androids, the lack of an R rating could very well indicate a lack of literal gore more than a lack of intensity,” suggested hardplasticeyes. “I mean, Trachtenberg's work on Prey and especially Killer of Killers proves that he's completely ready to get nasty when it's called for.
“I'm 100% hyped. For me, the bold gambit of doing a Predator movie entirely about creatures and puppets and robots is a real treat.”
Last month, Trachtenberg said fans shouldn’t expect to see a Xenomorph from the Alien franchise in Predator: Badlands, despite evil megacorp Weyland-Yutani featuring prominently in the movie’s trailers.
Elle Fanning’s Thia, as trailers have revealed, is a Weyland-Yutani synth from the nefarious company’s bio-weapons division. Weyland-Yutani seems to have some design — or at least presence — on the alien death world on which Badlands is set.
Alas, this all appears to be a mere sprinkling of Alien in Predator, as opposed to the Alien versus Predator rematch some fans had hoped for.
“There’s no Xenomorph in this movie,” Trachtenberg said. “But to me, that makes it more exciting. We’re not involving [the Alien franchise] just to smush the action figures together. There are great, organic story reasons for Weyland-Yutani to be in this film.”
The new Predator in Badlands is called Dek, an underdog Yautja “runt” in the protagonist role. Predator movies typically feature Yautja (the name given to the race of alien hunters) in antagonist roles. Dek selects his hunting ground, a “Death Planet” called Kalisk, and it’s here he fights to prove his worth to his father and for acceptance within his own clan. In the trailer we hear Dek speak, insisting he’s not the prey here.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Terra dei Fuochi, primo arresto in Italia per spedizione illegale di rifiuti