Warning: This post contains spoilers for the ending of Predator: Badlands.
Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator: Badlands premiered last weekend to commercial and critical acclaim. Now, spoilery interviews with the director are hitting the internet.
In them, Trachtenberg explains where that surprise twist at the very end came from and what it means (or doesn’t mean) for the franchise.
Predator: Badlands differs from the movies before it in that the protagonist of the film is a Predator (or Yautja, as they call themselves) named Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi). After Dek’s brother saves him from his father’s order to murder him, Dek ends up on a planet where the reported predator of all predators lives. He seeks to kill it and at least temporarily teams up with an android (Elle Fanning) and a little killing machine of an alien named Bud, and the plot unfolds from there.
I’m not going to spoil the entire film, so I’ll fast forward to the end, where Dek, who has truly been fighting against his family all along, ends up killing his father and finding a newfound family. The last few minutes, however, see a Yautja spaceship enter the scene, and Dek says his mom is on board.
The reveal is surprising, not only because it establishes that not all of Dek’s family is dead, but also because it confirms that female Yautja exist, which we have never seen on screen.
In an interview with Variety, Trachtenberg explains why he wanted to tease Dek’s mom at the end. “What I love about that ending is that it works as a final twist on the story that we’ve just been seeing, but also sets up an expectation for something that I think is pretty groovy,” he said. “If I were to go forward, I don’t think that would be the whole reason, but that would be a very cool element to include.”
He added, “What’s so great is we now have all these interesting characters, and who knows what the next one is? I didn’t know the next one was going to be Killer of Killers or Dek’s story, and then it ended up we were doing both at the same time. There’s many open doors to walk through next, that’s for sure…. It can all go out the door once we start putting pen to paper on stuff, but I’ve looked as far as I could to feel comfortable about what I’m doing. Every movie is a complete thought, not that much unlike the early Marvel stuff before the first Avengers movie, where it’s like, those are great movies, and lo and behold, we’re actually setting up that things could come together in a delicious way. But they weren’t like, ‘See how everything’s interconnected like crazy all of a sudden!’ So I’m trying to learn that lesson and make sure that any of these movies that we do are awesome ideas for movies on their own.”
Implicit in that “before the first Avengers” comment is the apparent desire to not follow the format of post-Avengers Marvel Cinematic Universe films, where sometimes those connections seemed forced and inserted at the cost of the story. Trachtenberg understandably seems to want to avoid that, meaning that what happens next in the Predator universe, including whether Trachtenberg will even make another film in the franchise, is still anyone’s guess.
