Two weeks ahead of its wide release, the final trailer for Shane Black's The Predator dropped revealing the most extensive look at the cast and the upcoming sequel yet. More intriguingly, it looks to expand the franchise's mythos on the big screen to an extent not seen since 1990's Predator 2, which offered the first look inside a hunter's spacecraft and revealed that the extraterrestrial monsters existed in the same cinematic universe as Ridley Scott's Alien franchise.
Figuring prominently in the trailer is a female Predator, with the hunter closely resembling its traditional design in size and lethal weaponry. The film marks the first time the female gender of the alien species has been seen on-screen, though comics published by Dark Horse Comics had previously explored the Predator society. There, the female hunters are regarded equally to their male counterparts, though we don't know whether that will translate to the big screen. Also seen is the film's marquee antagonist, dubbed by Sterling K. Brown's character, Will Traeger, as "the ultimate Predator".
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More physically imposing and featuring different skin pigmentation than traditional hunters, the genetically-enhanced Predator offers a motivation previous ones lacked: Hunting across the cosmos for genetic material to upgrade the species through gene splicing. The idea of larger Predators is not entirely new to the franchise: 2010's Predators featured "super Predators" that similarly hunted their traditional counterparts. However, the upcoming sequel features both a different design and different origin, explaining how the larger hunters came to be.
Another concept reimagined from the 2010 film is that the larger hunters employ Predator hounds to assist them in their hunt. Featuring a sleek redesign that make the hunting companions appear more like their humanoid overseers, the trailer shows the beasts in action to terrifying effect. The concept that only larger Predators have access to these hell-hounds furthers the concept that there is a hierarchy to the extraterrestrial society that audiences have only caught glimpses of so far.
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Perhaps most interestingly is that the new film marks the first time that the hunters receive the "Predator" moniker, being named by Traeger while a captive alien is under observation in a top-secret government facility. Previously, the hunters had only been referred to on-screen as "monsters" or "aliens," with the most iconic term in-universe being Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover's characters each calling the alien "one ugly motherfucker" in their respective films.
As Traeger explains the backstory behind a captive hunter to Olivia Munn's character, Casey Brackett, Brackett observes that the extraterrestrial is more "sports hunter" than "predator." Traeger doesn't deny it, but shrugs it off and reveals that the staff had taken a poll, finding "predator" to be a cooler term for the alien species, effectively providing the creatures with their iconic name.
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From redesigning and expanding on previous elements of the cinematic franchise to providing new origins and motivations that hadn't been seen in the popular sci-fi/action series before, Black and co-writer Fred Dekker (The Monster Squad) have quietly been adding to the franchise without losing sight of the visceral, bloody action that has endeared it to fans for decades. Even with the franchise now over 30 years old, the filmmakers have just uncovered the tip of the iceberg for the backstory behind the eponymous alien hunter.
Directed by Shane Black from a script he wrote with Fred Dekker, The Predator stars Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, Alfie Allen, Jane Thomas, Augusto Aguilera, Jake Busey, and Yvonne Strahovski. The film arrives in theaters on September 14.