KILLER INSTINCT

YOU WAIT AGES FOR A NEW PREDATOR MOVIE AND THEN TWO COME ALONG AT ONCE... DIRECTOR DAN TRACHTENBERG TALKS US THROUGH PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS

- WORDS: DARREN SCOTT

FOLLOWING THE SUCCESS OF Prey in 2022, another Predator sequel was guaranteed - but this time putting the Yautja back on the big screen where they belong. Predator: Badlands releases this November, but that wasn't enough for the director of both movies, Dan Trachtenberg. “Just to go back in time a little bit to when I was asked about the sequel [to Prey] and what would I do, thankfully I had, I think, three very cool ideas,” Trachtenberg explains to SFX at his Walt Disney Studios editing bay in Los Angeles. “One of them, the first one, the one I was the most excited about at the time, was Badlands. But then there was this other thing that was like, ‘Yeah, Prey was really cool. We got to put the Predator in this different time period and tell that story.’

“I think the thing that made Prey special, though, wasn’t just Predator in a different time period - it’s that the story we were telling was made better by the story of the Predator, and I didn’t want to just throw them into a different time period. I really wanted to figure out, if we were to do that kind of thing again, how it could be special and what kind of story we could tell that could be equally badass and awesome, but also emotional and thematically character-oriented.

“So thinking about the different time periods, I honed in on the idea of what if we made an animated movie where we could express ourselves in a way that we don't [usually] get to see. We've now had all these Predator movies, and we're doing this one [Predator: Badlands] that’s crazy different. But still, with all that stuff, the other side of the coin that I love in Predator movies is that hard-R, crazy carnage. Wouldn't it be cool to see that in a different medium? So we made this movie, Killer Of Killers, at the exact same time - stupidly, but awesomely - and it is an anthology movie.”