Earlier this year, 20th Century Studios announced that Predator: Badlands will mark the franchise’s return to the big screen for the first time since 2018’s The Predator. But apparently the studio has much bigger plans for the franchise than anyone believed, and that includes a previously unannounced secret Predator movie.
20th Century Studios President Steve Asbell dropped the news during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. He also confirmed that Prey director Dan Trachenberg is directing both of the upcoming Predator films.
“After Prey became a success, Dan [Trachtenberg] came back and said he didn’t want to do Prey 2,” recalled Asbell. “And we’re like, ‘What do you want to do?’ And he rattled off a bunch of ideas that were really crazy, but really cool. We’ve actually done two of them. Two are coming out next year. One I can’t talk about yet, but the other one is the live-action Predator film with Elle Fanning that just wrapped in New Zealand. That’ll be out theatrically sometime next year… It’s titled Badlands and it is an absolutely 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.”
Asbell declined to share any details about the second Predator film, but he did disclose that it would be released before Badlands, which he specifically said was live-action. That may mean that the second film is animated. It’s also possible that the second Predator movie could be another Hulu exclusive, like Prey was. But for now, we can only speculate. As for the future of the franchise, Asbell hinted that another Alien vs. Predator crossover could happen.
“It wouldn’t be in the way you think,” explained Asbell. “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 combineā¦perhaps. But we haven’t gotten to that point. And we’re not just going to bang it out.”
Predator: Badlands will be released on November 7, 2025, a date it inherited from Marvel’s Blade reboot earlier this week.
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