Dan Trachtenberg’s back in the world of Predator for Predator: Killer Of Killers – and here’s the first trailer for the incoming feature.
If every ailing film franchise could find its own Dan Trachtenberg then surely Hollywood would be in a more interesting place right now. After entering the dreaded ‘remix’ stage of its lifecycle with 2018’s The Predator, it looked like the concept of alien hunters coming to Earth to bag themselves a trophy or two was on life support. After all, we’d reached that point when the series was taking great pains to remind us of the original film – just to try and hide the fact that the film that we were watching wasn’t really that great.
Happily though, along came filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg to revitalise the series with 2022’s Prey, a creative reset for the series that takes the Predator concept of superior alien hunter versus outmatched human and in a simple narrative flourish, reimagined it in a different historical setting. In this case, the 18th century Comanche Nation.
Given how studio executives tend to adore a concept that can simply be quickly retooled and then developed into a sequel, we’d imagine that 20th Century Studios brass were eagerly awaiting to see which era of history Trachtenberg would want to tackle in his follow-up to Prey. While the filmmaker is giving them (and us) exactly that, it’s coming in a format which is not what we expected at all.
Predator: Killer Of Killers releases on June 6th, and it’s going to be an animated feature that will be heading straight to Disney+ here in the UK by the looks of it.
It’s an animated anthology film that will see one of the fearsome alien warriors take on a slew of deadly human killers ripped straight from the pages of history. Vikings. Ninjas. A WWII ace pilot. Wholesale agents of slaughter and yet we can’t help shake the feeling that when these legendary bringers of death face off against this hulking monster, they might find themselves unexpectedly on the back foot. (That’s because we’ve seen the trailer and, er, bad things happen.)
This is of course the ‘secret’ Predator film that has been in development while Trachtenberg has been working on the live action sequel to Prey, that being Predator: Badlands. The latter film looks like we’ll be seeing Trachtenberg take the series to fresh narrative ground once again with some of the details emerging from that production sounding wonderfully bonkers.
Badlands is coming to cinemas in November but in the meantime, here’s the trailer for Predator: KIller Of Killers, set for release in June.
