While Predator: Badlands might officially feature some crossover with the Alien franchise, Dan Trachtenberg’s sequel is still notable for telling a Predator story that the rival sci-fi series could never pull off. The Predator movies tried their best, but none of the original 1987 movie’s follow-ups could quite recapture the unique blend of intense action, surprisingly brutal gore, and inventive sci-fi storytelling that made the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle sing. That is, until director Dan Trachtenberg’s 2022 prequel Prey.

Prey managed to live up to the promise of Predator with its stripped-back, deceptively simple story of Amber Midthunder’s Comanche heroine Naru evading the Predator on the Great Plains in 1719. Prey was such a success that Trachtenberg now has two Predator movies coming in 2025, the animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers and the live-action sequel Predator: Badlands. Although Predator: Killer of Killers is the Predator movie viewers have wanted for decades, the first teaser trailer for Predator: Badlands proves it might be even more exciting for fans of the franchise.

Predator: Badlands Has A Predator As The Main Character

The Franchise’s Monster Becomes Its Protagonist This Time Around

Predator: Badlands stars Elle Fanning as Thia, a Weyland-Yutani synthetic who teams up with the outcast Yautja Dek to survive on a harsh, remote planet. That’s right, Predator: Badlands revealed its links to the Alien movies as early as its first teaser trailer with a sH๏τ of Thia’s eyes powering down like David from Prometheus or Andy from Alien: Romulus. However, this isn’t even the most exciting aspect of the movie’s plot.

The thing that makes Predator: Badlands truly special is the fact that Trachtenberg’s movie has a Predator as its hero, not its villain. The series has toyed with this approach before, most notably in the deservedly derided Alien Vs Predator movies. In both 2004’s Alien Vs Predator and 2007’s gorier, somehow worse follow-up Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem, comparatively heroic Yautja teamed up with humans to ensure that Xenomorphs didn’t annihilate the population of Earth. However, neither of these plots worked.

The Yautja were nowhere near as threatening as they usually are in these movies, since they were reduced to being clean-up crews for the voracious, monstrous Xenomorphs. As such, it was never all that engaging to see their softer side when their collaboration with humans was clearly just pragmatism. In contrast, what makes the Predator franchise’s future so exciting is Predator: Badlands positioning Dek as its true protagonist.

The Yautja Have Always Been More Relatable Than The Xenomorphs

The Xenomorph Is More Feral And Less Human

While Thia is likely to play a big role by working with Dek, the teaser trailer for Predator: Badlands makes it obvious that the Yautja runt is the movie’s lead character. This is a radical departure from the rest of the series, but simultaneously an approach that has been hinted at since the original movie. Even without taking into account tie-in comics and novels, the тιтular threats from the Predator series have always been much more humanized than the Alien franchise’s otherwise comparable Xenomorph.

The Yautja have a society, spaceships, technology, clothing, and an honor code, as well as a complex language with both written and spoken signifiers. If the Xenomorphs are perfect killing machines precisely because they are mindless monsters that can’t be reasoned or even communicated with, the Yautja are a far more human sort of foe. While Prometheus’s strangest plot holes implied the Xenomorph might have always been designed to function as a bioweapon, the Yautja are much more like a tribal species that shares a surprising number of similarities with humanity.

Why The Predator Franchise Always Needed Predator: Badlands

The Series Has Always Humanized Its Villain

Ever since the finale of Predator, where the eponymous monster took off its mask to fight Dutch as a sign of respect, the Predator series has always toyed with the idea of a Yautja protagonist. The human characters in the series are constantly compared to the Yautja. The heroes of the original movie are foreign soldiers invading Central America, so it’s fitting and ironic when they are picked off by another invader with even more advanced technology at their disposal.

Similarly, much like Alien: Romulus’s story humanized Andy more than Prometheus’s David, Predator: Badlands can make Thia the first outright heroic synthetic through her collaboration with Dek. Thus, the franchise can prove that the Yautja and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s creations are no less morally complex and redeemable than the human characters of the series, complicating the morality of both franchises in the process. It would be impossible to make an Alien movie where the Xenomorph is the hero, but Predator: Badlands seems destined to do exactly that for the Predator franchise’s Yautja when Trachtenberg’s sequel arrives.