It is insane to think that it has now been nearly 40 full years since Arnold Schwarzenegger was in a Predator movie. The actor is synonymous with the franchise, thanks to his instantly iconic performance as Dutch in the 1987 John McTiernan action classic, original recipe Predator. And yet, despite the fact that Schwarzenegger is clearly a big fan of the film and audiences have been practically begging for him to return in some capacity for literal decades, that return has never quite happened. At least, not until now, it seems, as Schwarzenegger recently revealed at the Arnold Sports Convention that yes, he is in talks to come back for a brand new Predator film, teaming with current franchise creative lead, Dan Trachtenberg.
“They did an additional ‘Predator’ and the director [Dan Trachtenberg] has been doing a great job of that. Now, he wants me to be in the next ‘Predator.’ We’ve talked about it,” Schwarzenegger told the crowd (via Variety). “As a matter of fact, Fox Studios has kind of rediscovered Arnold. They’ve come to me and said, ‘We want you to do “Predator,” we just got a script for you to do “Commando 2.”‘
Since Schwarzenegger last appeared in a Predator film, there have been eight sequels. And of those eight, most of them either had Dutch written into their story at one point or even got as far as asking the action hero to come back, but it never quite worked out. By the time Predator 2 rolled around, Arnold had moved on to other projects. He was initially in talks to appear in a small role in Alien vs. Predator, but that was quickly axed when he became the governor of California. Shane Black asked him to return in a cameo appearance in The Predator, but Arnold ultimately turned it down.
The closest audiences have gotten to his proper return was actually in last year’s animated anthology sequel, Predator: Killer of Killers, which was helmed by Trachtenberg. That film featured an end scene that revealed a comatose Dutch was being kept in stasis by the Yautja for future gladiatorial battles. Obviously, being kept in cryosleep, the character had no lines, and being animated, it wasn’t actually Schwarzenegger. But, Trachtenberg was clearly laying the groundwork for things to come, and now, with Schwarzenegger's recent comments, it sounds like he’s making good on that promise.
Given the raging critical and commercial successes of Trachtenberg’s trilogy thus far (Prey, Killer of Killers, and Predator: Badlands) it's no real surprise that Disney and 20th Century Studios apparently have even bigger things planned for the director and franchise. Trachtenberg and his producing partners have even spoken in the past about how getting Arnold Schwarzenegger to come back was a “white whale” for them, something they definitely wanted to see happen, and now that dream is coming true.
Of course, the real question becomes exactly how Dutch is going to play into the story. Because of that brief appearance in Killer of Killers, we know that Dutch was put into stasis by the Yautja shortly after the events of the first film, given that he still looks like a circa-1987 Arnold Schwarzengger. So does that mean that any live-action film moving forward with that character is going to have to de-age Arnold for the whole runtime? Or will the film be set even further in the future, as Badlands was, and somehow explain Schwarzengger's aging in-narrative?
These are questions fans are undoubtedly eager to have answered, but the fact that Trachtenberg will be the one doing the answering is a prize in and of itself. The filmmaker has single-handedly revitalized the Predator franchise over the last few years, and honestly, no one is more deserving of getting to dust off Dutch and throw him back into the mix than Trachtenberg.