In the last three years, the Alien/Predator franchise has been as active as any in modern Hollywood. Audiences have seen three new movies (Prey, Alien: Romulus, Predator: Killer Of Killers) and a new TV series (Alien: Earth), and we’ll be treated to the arrival of Predator: Badlands in theaters everywhere. Needless to say, it’s a fertile time for the canon, and while the stories are pretty disparate, it can be said that there is some cool sharing of ideas coming out of the overlapping production/release schedules.
I asked about filmmaker collaboration this past weekend when I interviewed director Dan Trachtenberg at the Los Angeles press day for Predator: Badlands – he having contributed majorly already to the franchise by helming Prey and Predator: Killer Of Killers. He started by saying that there wasn’t really any communication at all between the various projects (despite the fact that he is friendly with Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez), but that was principally because it wasn’t something that was necessary for the story that he was telling. Trachtenberg explained,
Fede Álvarez and I are friends, but, ironically, I wasn't really super aware of Romulus when we started making Badlands. And I was not aware at all of Alien: Earth. But I instinctually sort of set Badlands as far into the future as possible just to make sure I wasn't going to step on anyone's toes. I didn't even really quite know that Romulus was actually so set in the past and in between films.
Predator: Badlands not only takes place further into the future than any previous story told in the continuity, but it takes place on alien worlds far from Earth and doesn’t even feature any human characters. That being said, it does make the biggest moves since the release of Alien vs. Predator: Requiem in 2007 to fuse the canons of the Alien and Predator movies. Specifically, while it doesn’t have any human characters, what it does have are Weyland-Yutani synths.
This is where the aforementioned sharing of ideas comes in. Predator: Badlands was in production in the middle of last year, and the timing happened to coincide with the theatrical release of Alien: Romulus. When Dan Trachtenberg and members of his crew saw scenes featuring Andy (David Jonsson) with the Weyland-Yutani logo in his eyes, they immediately saw potential:
But when I saw Romulus – I saw a little bit of an early cut, and then we all watched when we were down in New Zealand and we all watched as a crew. And the thing with the eyes, just having the ‘ W’ in the whites when they roll back? Immediately it was like, ‘We gotta use that.’ And there were so many places for it in our movie. So I was thrilled to be able to take that and run with it.
The end result are moments in Predator: Badlands when Elle Fanning’s Thia goes into a kind of standby mode and her eyes look just like Andy’s in Alien: Romulus:
But what about Alien: Earth? The Noah Hawley-created series completed the run of its eight-episode first season in September, but it finished filming before the start of principal photography on Predator: Badlands. Again, the two projects occupy very distant points on the canon timeline, but Hawley did reach out to Dan Trachtenberg and gave him a special preview of what he was cooking up:
Noah reached out when he saw our trailer and was like, ‘Wait, you got Weyland-Yutani in your thing?’ And he sent me where they were at with the episodes of Alien: Earth at that point, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing,’ and assured him, ‘Don't worry we're way beyond. We are not really doing anything similar.’ So yeah, we don't have much cause for specific collaboration 'cause we're in such different parts of the universe, but I'm certainly leaving things open to be included upon and ideas to be taken, if someone should want to.
In everything we’ve seen in the last three years, there is a lot of great storytelling and a lot of potential for the future established – but the immediate present is delivering us the badassness of Predator: Badlands. Starring newcomer Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi as a runt member of the Yautja species who has to prove himself worthy of his people’s warrior culture, the film arrives in theaters everywhere this Friday, November 7.
