Predator is getting a prequel titled Skull, according to this Collider interview with producers John Davis and John Fox. Fox and Davis went back to the basics, apparently. There’s no (now-elderly) Arnold Schwarzenegger bellowing for everyone to get back to “da choppah.”
“It goes back to what made the original Predator movie work,” Davis told Collider, “It’s the ingenuity of a human being who won’t give up, who’s able to observe and interpret, basically being able to beat a stronger, more powerful, well-armed force.”
While an ingenious lone human against one of the towering, crab-faced creatures is exactly the basic plot of the original 1987 movie, the producers actually think their film has much more in common with a prestigious historical drama—the movie that netted Leonardo DiCaprio his first Oscar, The Revenant.
“It actually has more akin to The Revenant than it does any film in the Predator canon,” John Fox said, “You’ll know what I mean once you see it.”
Fox isn’t being as cagey as he may have intended in making that comparison. Revenant was about one man alone against the wilderness at a time when you could only survive if you had a sharp enough wit and some real survival skills. No tech as we know it today. So it sounds like the alien hunters have the deck stacked in their favor even more than before.
According to producers, the movie was essentially filmed in secret. And they think it could even compare to the original. Davis said, “it’s going to be, I believe, the second best — or the first… or it may be equal to the first one. Right?”
“I feel like the first one was a wonderful, interesting movie,” he continued, “and I know what worked about it. I feel like we kind of never got back there again. We ended up in different places. I think this is a worthy complement to the first one. It’s going to be as good.”
That’s a hell of a brag, considering that the original Schwarzenegger film was an almost instant sci-fi classic, still the source of memes today.
Closer details about the movie are still few, but it was directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who helmed Cloverfield sequel 10 Cloverfield Lane, which featured John Goodman playing the bad guy for once, in a memorably chilling performance.
Skull is expected to hit theaters sometime in 2022.
