What happened to the heroes of the "Predator" movies?
Why are Predators so attracted to heat? What's the reasoning behind their methods?
Watch for even more questions we may never know the answers to.
To date, no character — human or otherwise — has been featured in more than one film
in the Predator franchise. The lack of any recurring characters
is one of the franchise’s strengths, but it does leave one curious as to
how each human moves on with their life after surviving the Yautja.
Each sequel has attempted to have Schwarzenegger reprise his role
as Alan Dutch Schaefer, but he's refused, leaving the character's fate hazy for decades. In 2020,
Arnold gave in for the 2020 video game, Preda tor: Hunting Grounds. This game includes audio
journals accounting for Dutch's actions between 1987 and the game's 2025 setting.
According to the journals, Dutch has been traveling the world, searching for more evidence
of the Yautja's presence on Earth. He teams up with the Other Worldly Life Forms Program,
the shady government agency from Predator 2. As the Earth gets hotter, Predators visit frequently,
leading to repeated battles between Dutch and the Yautja. By 2025,
he's been rebuilt using Yautja tech, fearless and fit, despite his advanced age.
"This thing is hunting us....all of us"
Across the Predator franchise, the Yautja have demonstrated a common modus operandi
that includes a few signature kills. No Predator film would be complete, for instance,
without someone having their skull and spine ripped out of their bodies in one
swift motion. The Yautja remove skulls and spines to display them as trophies,
and add bones to their armor to show off their killing prowess. Their reasoning behind
flaying a victim and leaving their bodies behind, however, is a little more murky.
The intention behind hanging their skinned prey is still the subject of debate among
fans. The Yaujta do not appear to collect the skins they remove from their victims,
so it's clearly the bodies themselves that are important to the ritual. It's likely that these
bodies are left as a form of intimidation to throw their next opponents off balance.
There's also a theory that only those considered easy prey are flayed, as they are unworthy of
having their bones collected as trophies. "Not only did I kill this guy," this action says,
according to this theory, "but I even had time to rip his skin off afterwards.
If you don't want the same thing to happen to you, you'd better be more entertaining."
In Predator, rebel Anna tells the mercenaries that their stalker matches the description of, quote,
"the demon who makes trophies of man," from local folklore. The stalkers are said to only
appear during the hottest summers. When the Yautja return to Earth in Predator 2,
it's during a record-breaking heat wave in LA.
Predator: Hunting Grounds implies that climate change has made the Earth a more
attractive place to hunt. The natural assumption to make is that the heat
mirrors that of the Yautja's natural habitat, and that a hot summer is the
time during which the Earth is most habitable for both humans and Yautja.
As the series progresses, the Yautja's preference in climate is less emphasized. Alien vs. Predator
reveals some Yautja visit every 100 years — in Antarctica. Furthermore, Aliens vs. Predator:
Requiem is set in Colorado, and the story is explicitly set near Halloween in The Predator.
This doesn't mean that the Predators don't still prefer the heat, but it does remove its necessity.
In Predator 2, Mike Harrigan discovers an alien hunter, nicknamed "City Hunter" by fans,
has been on an undercover killing spree. The film concludes with Harrigan chasing the Predator
to his ship and killing him. However, other Yautja have been watching all of this unfold,
hidden by cloaking technology. They retrieve the dead Predator's body and leave LA.
Out of this group of Yautja, only one is seen making kills. It's unclear if the others simply
haven't been caught, remain on the ship the entire time, or if they are here on other business.
Only one member of the Los Angeles hunting party — their leader, Greyback — ever appears again in the
Predator expanded universe, and that story does not account for his whereabouts during Predator 2.
" You can't see the eyes of the demon, until him come calling."
At the end of Predator 2 Harrigan receives a trophy from the Yautja leader for killing the
City Hunter. It's a flintlock pistol labeled "Raphael Adolini, 1715."
This gift is evidence that the Yautja have been hunting on Earth for centuries.
The 1996 comic Predator: 1718 depicts the original encounter between the Yautja known as Greyback and
pirate captain Raphael Adolini. Andolini, a criminal with a righteous moral compass,
wants to return a chest of gold to the church from which it was stolen. His crew objects and
mutinies. Greyback surprisingly joins Adolini and together they defeat his traitorous crew.
Andolini is lethally injured and offers Greyback his pistol as a tribute.
The protagonist of Alien vs. Predator is Lex Woods, an expert ice climber hired to guide
an expedition to explore an ancient temple beneath an Antarctic island. Lex survives being picked off
by the xenomorphs and Yautja, and allies herself with the Yautja hunter Scar. She receives a Yautja
Combistick weapon as a trophy, and much of her fate after the Yautja craft departs is unknown.
Lex's arc hasn't been revisited or referenced in any expanded universe material. However,
there is a piece of evidence that Lex, or at least her weapons,
were recovered from the Antarctic battle site. In 2018's The Predator,
Dr. Casey Brackett explores Project Stargazer's headquarters and finds a case containing Lex's
spear. This seems to confirm that Alien vs. Predator is still part of the Predator canon.
The action of Alien vs. Predator takes place inside an ancient temple in Antarctica,
the site of a ritual where adolescent Yautja prove themselves against the
universe's ultimate killing machines. Inside the temple lies an enslaved xenomorph queen,
kept in hibernation for a century at a time. A few hours before a hunt,
she's forced to lay eggs so that the Yautja will have something to test themselves against.
In 2004's ritual, the queen gets wise and instructs her children to set her free by
melting her chains with their acidic blood. At the film's climax, the queen escapes the temple
into the abandoned town, and battles on the ice with Lex and Scar, the last human and Yautja.
They successfully chain her to a heavy iron vat and push it into the freezing water.
The queen drops to the bottom of the sea and is presumably no longer a threat.
Other films in the Alien series have shown that xenomorphs are capable of enduring the freezing
airless vacuum of space. It is likely the queen could survive these conditions for a while or
even forever! Nevertheless, the Antarctic queen has never reappeared in the franchise's canon.
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem picks up where the first AvP leaves off,
with a xenomorph chestburster emerging from Scar's corpse. This xenomorph has taken on
many of the traits of its Yautja host to become the even deadlier "Predalien".
When the Predalien crash-lands a spacecraft loaded with xenomorph eggs in Colorado,
another Predator, Wolf, is set loose to clean up the mess. Wolf battles with the
Predalien and a hoard of xenomorphs, but this battle is moot — the story ends with
the US government dropping a nuke on the village, destroying almost all evidence of the conflict.
In the final scene, US Army Colonel Stevens presents Ms. Yutani with a plasma pistol
fashioned by Wolf. Yutani seems to have plans for the pistol that are,
quote, "not for this world." It's implied that Yutani plans to reverse-engineer the technology
to advance her company's interests in space, leading to the Weyland-Yutani
Corporation's dominance of space freight and xenomorph experimentation in the Alien series.
Requiem doesn't have a sequel so we don't have many details on what will happen next. Also,
the release of Prometheus in 2012 detached the Alien franchise from the continuity of AvP,
leaving the future of the Yutani Corporation uncertain.
2010's Predators takes the action off Earth entirely, and follows a group of humans who
are each abducted and transported to a planet that is a massive game preserve. Each of the
human captives is a predator in their own right — a soldier, a convict, a gangster,
and so on — but most of them are no match for their pursuers, who are bigger and badder than
any Yautja seen previously. They're picked off one by one until the only survivors are American
mercenary Royce and IDF sniper Isabelle. Predators ends with Isabelle and Royce victorious over
their hunters, but still stranded on the planet, where another hunting season is about to begin.
Unlike most protagonists in the Predator franchise, Isabelle and Royce received a
follow-up story immediately, in the form of an official sequel comic: 2010's Predators:
Preserve the Game. The one-shot comic picks up two months after the film,
as Royce and Isabelle continue to pick off Predators and salvage their gear.
The Yautja determine Royce is a worthy opponent, and gifts him his own set of Predator armor to
wear in one-on-one battle against a four-armed super-Yautja. But Royce learns to depend on
someone else for a change and sets himself up as bait so that Isabelle can get the kill.
They remain trapped on the planet, waiting for an opportunity to hijack a starship.
In The Predator, another Yautja comes to Earth. But this time, he's not here to hunt — he's on the
run from the larger, genetically-enhanced Upgrade Predator. The Fugitive crash-lands in Mexico,
but not before ejecting a pod containing some precious cargo. By the end of the film,
both Predators are dead. With the help of young linguistic genius Rory McKenna,
US military scientists are able to determine that the rebel Predator came to Earth to deliver
the humans a weapon: A powered suit of armor called the Predator-Killer. Rory's father,
Army Ranger Quinn McKenna, plans to wear it in battle next time the Yautja come calling.
But why did the Fugitive Predator decide to give this weapon to humanity in the first place?
Does it have anything to do with the human DNA found in his blood? If he's here to help us,
he's got a funny way of showing it, as he kills nearly every person he sees during his time on
our planet. His apparently benevolent intentions are only revealed in the final scene of the film,
a teaser for a sequel that has never happened.
This last-minute twist may be the result of the film's reshoots, which reportedly changed
a great deal of the film's overall plot. In fact, in one of the three filmed endings,
the Fugitive's cargo pod contains Ellen Ripley, heroine of the Alien films.
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