i want you to hit me as hard as you can...
Stick around! The bar for a new Predator movie wasn't exactly high. Predator 2 came out way back
in 1990. That movie teased a showdown between two of science fiction's most feared creatures,
which Fox finally put on screen in 2004 with Alien vs Predator. But Paul WS Anderson's conflict was
released to mostly negative reviews and its 2007 follow-up made less money and received abysmal
audience response and a critical beating. The 2010 reboot Predators wasn't a massive financial
success but scored high enough with critics and crowds to keep the franchise on Fox's mind.
Finally in 2014 talks of a new Predator installment began. Shane Black was confirmed
to helm the project, which seemed like an exciting choice. Aside from a resume of fan favorites like
Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3, Black had his very own personal experience
with the original Predator in 1987. And he would write the new script with old friend Fred Dekker,
known for cult classics Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad. Who could be a better
match to relaunch the Predator franchise? What could possibly go wrong? Put on your best camo
and set your sights on what the [ __ ] happened to this movie! Once the news of Shane Black's
involvement in The Predator was announced, the producers released a teaser poster on social
media to judge the response and received an overwhelmingly positive reaction. So it
seemed like they were on the right track. Fans hoped that Black's storytelling ability and
familiarity with the iconic creature would be the perfect combination to reinvigorate the franchise,
and Black further stoked that excitement, stating in early interviews that he had a fresh direction,
envisioning it as an event movie that could serve as a new launching point for the series.
Casting began in late 2016 with Benicio Del Toro originally in talks to play the lead human role.
But he dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. He was replaced by Boyd Holbrook taking over as
US army ranger Quinn Mckenna. Olivia Munn came on to play scientist Casey Brackett,
and they would be joined by Trevante Rhodes from the Oscar-winning Moonlight,
along with Keegan Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Augusto Aguilera, Alfie Allen, and Sterling K
Brown as shady government agent Traeger. Yvonne Strahovski would play Mckenna's wife with Jacob
Tremblay in the critical role of his autistic son Rory. And just in case you were wondering,
yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger was offered a cameo in the film as a chance to reprise his cigar
chomping predator survivor Dutch Schaefer. Arnie turned the part down because of the short length
of the appearance, feeling that it wouldn't do justice to the character he made so famous.
Shooting on The Predator began in February 2017 with a release first scheduled for March 2018
then moved up to February. But not long after that announcement was made the release date
was pushed all the way out to August of 2018. A plot synopsis for the film had leaked online
and there were rumors that the fan backlash was a serious concern for Fox. Several weeks
of reshoots happened in March of 2018, a year after cameras had initially rolled. Just months
before the planned release date, nearly the entire third act of the movie was scrapped and re-shot.
Then only weeks before the movie's release still more reshoots took place in late July.
Talk about cutting it close. On the topic of cutting it close, just days before the movie was
set to hit screens came a new controversy behind the scenes. Shane Black had hired longtime friend
Steve Wilder to play a minor role in the film. The director had previously given him similar
bit parts in Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys. In The Predator, Wilder played a jogger who repeatedly
tries to flirt with Olivia Munn's character in the park at the beginning of the movie. A detail
not shared with Munn or any of the cast and crew was that Wilder was a registered sex offender.
Munn became aware of Wilder's troubling past on her own and brought it to Fox executives,
insisting that their scene together be removed from the film. stay the [ __ ] away from me. Munn
said that Fox chastised her for informing her co-stars of the situation, but the studio did
remove Wilder's scene from the movie. Shane Black instead chose to publicly defend his decision
and his friend but after tremendous backlash and the details of Wilder's case becoming public,
Black rescinded his previous comments and made a new statement through his publicist,
apologizing and claiming he was just trying to help a friend but was misled about his history.
On September 14, 2018 more than three decades after the visiting species first started ripping
out spines on the big screen, The Predator was released in theaters. The R-rated film opens with
one of the space hunters on the run from a larger craft, using a portal to evade its aggressor
before entering earth's atmosphere. Mckenna and his team investigate the crash and are attacked by
the extraterrestrial. After injuring the creature, Mckenna manages to escape along with some of the
predator technology, which he sends home to his p.o. box. But the parcel is instead forwarded
to his wife's house where his son Rory finds the package and somehow activates the alien hardware.
At this point evolutionary biologist Casey Brackett is brought to a secret facility to
examine the injured creature. Meanwhile Mckenna is put on a bus with other military prisoners
known collectively as the Loonies. The predator predictably wakes up and wreaks havoc in the lab
before escaping, chased by Casey and the Loonies, by Traeger and his team, and soon after by another
larger and much more frightening super predator that pursued him through space. Seems like a
solid synopsis and fans were interested but ultimately disappointed. The Predator opened
with 24 million dollars but ended up with only 51 million in North America and a global gross
of 160 million on a cost that had eventually risen to 88 million dollars, more than twice the cost of
2010's Predators. For comparison, 2004's Alien vs Predator had finished with 172 million worldwide
and the original Predator earned 98 million in 1987 which is around 230 million today.
Critically the film didn't do well either. Variety called it an exhaustingly energetic mess
in which a coherent plot and credible characters aren't even on the cluttered menu. Nerdist said
the comedy and action are at war with each other characters spew ratatat quips while tussling with
predators and their pets, essentially neutralizing the effect of both the humor and the action.
And you know what? They're kinda right. The Predator suffered because it's sloppy,
it's overloaded with comedic moments meant to cut the tension. Unfortunately the incessant
frequency of jokes only suffocates the suspenseful moments. Sure there's plenty of macho banter but
too much feels like Black pulled it out of the reject folder from his previous scripts. Black
included callbacks to the previous movies in order to appease the fans but also wanted to expand
the mythology. This leads to some questionable creative decisions like a vicious predator hound
that suddenly becomes friendly when it gets shot in the head, or a change in the motivation of the
predators from using humans for target practice to harvesting our DNA for self-improvement.
And there's Mckenna's son Rory who has the kind of autism with nervous tics and sensory struggles
and photographic memory, but also the magical movie autism that lets him immediately understand
alien technology, a skill so important he ends up with a secret government job. Oh and also the
super predator wants his DNA because his autism is actually the next step in the evolutionary chain.
So yeah. That dubious plot point aside, there's also a character with Tourettes,
which is played for laughs, and he's one of several war-scarred military veterans nicknamed
the Loonies, which is pretty much the level of the movie's exploration of mental health issues.
Perhaps one of the movie's biggest shortcomings was the lack of a real star.
Following in the footsteps of someone like Schwarzenegger was always going to be a challenge
but Danny Glover and even Adrien Brody still managed to hold their own.
The Predator needed the intensity of someone like Beniccio Del Toro. Boyd Holbrook is competent but
you could swap him out for any number of other ubiquitous indistinguishable actors
and probably never notice the difference. The casting process had assembled some other decent
actors but the script only gives them vague outlines for characters. Traeger's defining
traits are that he constantly choose Nicorette gum and he's kind of a giant [ __ ]. Alfie Allen,
a prominent face from Game of Thrones barely gets any dialogue and seems to disappear for stretches
of the movie. Mckenna's wife escapes the super predator in a frantic sequence and she's never
seen again. Jake Busey was brought in to play the son of Gary Busey's character from Predator 2 and
he basically just delivers brief exposition and bleeds. We never learn why Munn's character is
proficient with military firearms or why she was such an indispensable expert on alien biology,
but apparently her experience wasn't good enough to continue working on the project even after she
helped defeat the super predator. At least they all made out better than Edward James Olmos,
who was cast as a military general and ended up on the cutting room floor. And speaking of the
cutting room, as previously mentioned the third act was completely reworked after the entire
sequence had been shot in daylight, only for the filmmakers to later decide it wasn't sufficiently
scary and needed to be set at night. Of course this doesn't necessarily explain the finished
movie's awkward and disorienting editing, like how you might miss the human villain accidentally
killing himself with a predator cannon, or how it's suddenly daytime for the final showdown,
or how Casey manages to seemingly traverse several miles of wilderness in a couple of minutes.
But that's in addition to all the other alterations and continuity problems and
missing moments, like how Mckenna gets from Mexico to a VA hospital in Tennessee,
or how the squad suddenly manages to acquire grenade launchers and machine guns,
or an excised sequence at Area 51 with the Loonies fighting alongside other hero predators against
the super predator, wherever the hell that would fit. On the page, The Predator seems to have the
right elements: a diverse military squad, snappy dialogue, testosterone fueled action, a lethal
alien adversary, intriguing extraterrestrial technology and plenty of carnage. But it just
never really congeals in a satisfying manner, and the choppy editing sure doesn't help. It's
difficult to believe this is the same Shane Black who made tight and clever movies like Kiss Kiss
Bang Bang and The Nice Guys, or managed to put his own stamp on the Marvel cinematic universe.
The plan all along for Shane Black's installment was to start a new trilogy of Predator films - the
tacked on ending with a suit of iron predator armor is clearly intended to set up the next
movie. But on top of the difficulties surrounding the film and the lackluster fan response,
the franchise then got even more entangled when Disney bought Fox and its properties in 2019.
And the original 1987 movie's screenwriters Jim and John Thomas filed a lawsuit in 2021
trying to recapture the rights. Still, a period Predator movie called Skulls is in the works from
10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg, so it seems like just a matter of time before we see
the dreadlocked extraterrestrial human hunting ugly [ __ ] materialize on screens once again.
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