Predator: Badlands – How Does a Yautja Protagonist Change The Franchise?

The Predator franchise is something of an odd presence in the modern blockbuster scene. If the original 1987 film had hit theaters in the 2020s, it might have strung together a successful series on the back of an excellent premise. Instead, it came out in the 80s and stumbled into several dodgy sequels, often with decades of intervening time. In Prey, the series seems to have found its step again, leading into the upcoming seventh entry, Badlands. Unlike its predecessors, Badlands will allegedly follow one of the franchise’s titular Yautja hunters, breaking the race from its usual villain role. That alteration would break new ground for the long-running series in many ways.

Disney currently owns both the Predator and Alien franchises, though it seems like the folks who collect paychecks from Disney are less involved in making those movies. They just bought the rights when they snagged 20th Century Fox, adding them to the pile with the other million big-name franchises they own. Their treatment of Alien has been questionable, leaving Predator in a bizarre place of potential peril. If Badlands turns out to be a schlocky mess of callbacks with very good special effects but no real substance, fans will probably have the pattern down.

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Predator: Badlands is a franchise first

The Yautja species has appeared in five canonical movies so far, and each one has portrayed some or all of them as the film’s antagonist. The lone exception is Alien vs. Predator, in which a Yautja hunter comes to save the wayward humans from the onslaught of Xenomorphs. They take on a similar role in the sequel, though they’re still a threat to the protagonists. In none of these cases is the titular Predator the main protagonist of the story. They’re the threat to be outwitted, the monster hiding in the trees, or the enemy that will almost certainly kill most of the cast. Predator: Badlands, along with at least a couple of human characters, will introduce an outcast Yautja as one of its primary protagonists. This raises a lot of questions about how that new Predator might be portrayed. As a pariah from his native society, the Badlands Yautja could bring a new spin to the species, adding a touch of nuance to a race that has almost always been impossibly straightforward. The Predators have been the denizens of a planet of hats since the early days, and a new direction could spice them up. However, it also interacts interestingly with the history of the franchise.

Badlands puts an interesting spin on the first Predator

The clever trick of John McTerinan’s original 1987 Predator is that it starts firmly in one genre before ramping off into another one entirely. Save for its spoiler-adjacent opening shot, one could watch the first act of Predator utterly convinced that it’s a sequel to Commando or any other Schwarzenegger action masterwork. A group of hilariously macho military men take to Central America with enough guns to clear-cut the jungle and immediately set to work doing just that. The tone only changes when they realize they aren’t the most capably violent being in the ecosystem. Then and only then does the Yautja pop out and start picking off the soldiers. It’s a sci-fi slasher from that moment on, shifting the positions of the protagonists several rungs down the power ladder in order to create tension in place of catharsis. Putting the Predator front and center offers two potential spins on this twist. The obvious trick might be to start with the slasher tone before shifting toward something more action-focused. Reversing that power balance shift would be an interesting commentary on the character and its role. Alternatively, the heroic Yautja might follow a similar shift toward desperation as they rebel against their native society. It’s a compelling take on the material either way.

Badlands is playing into a common horror franchise trope

The indelible law of horror franchises is that each entry tends to become more about the antagonist and less about the heroes. Those few franchises that do have iconic survivors tend to lose them in subsequent installments. The villain, on the other hand, sticks around as the franchise’s primary icon. The Yautja in Predator isn’t much of a character, but each entry seems to add a bit about the alien that further fleshes out their behavior. Predator is only partially a horror franchise, but the choice to center one of its titular monsters as a protagonist is the biggest leap the series has taken yet. It’s hard to imagine a Predator movie after Badlands returning to the tale of a batch of humans avoiding the hunter.

Predator: Badlands could be a bold new direction for the franchise, potentially paving a path for future entries. The next few films could follow the tale of the outcast hunter. That would be another first for the series, since every entry usually features a new Yautja without any returning characters. Fans will have to wait and see how Badlands handles the Predator when it hits theaters in November.

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