In so many ways, Predator: Badlands is one hell of an ambitious swing. In an era where so many big-budget franchises opt to play it safe and continue to retread well-worn ground, Predator: Badlands pushes the decades-old franchise into entirely new territory, centering its story on the trials and tribulations of a young Yautja’s first hunt and making the formidable movie monster the protagonist of his own story. This entirely eschews the formula which has been more or less in place since John McTiernan’s 1987 original film, Predator, and looks to broaden the horizons of the series in substantial ways.
What makes it even more shocking is how totally removed from the previous canon of these films the sequel is. On a metatextual level, Predator: Badlands is a successor to Prey, in that the film is director Dan Trachtenberg’s follow-up to that previous work. Prey was an inspired riff on the established Predator formula that was released straight-to-streaming and garnered immense levels of critical and commercial success in the process. As such, it afforded Trachtenberg the goodwill for this big-budget gonzo swing of a follow-up that is set completely apart from his previous movie.
But as the director recently revealed, the film initially was poised to have far more concrete connections to Prey. Namely, Badlands was at one point set to feature Amber Midthunder’s Prey protagonist, Naru.
Naru from Prey almost returned for Predator: Badlands
For his first entry into the Predator franchise, Trachtenberg rolled the clocks all the way back to 1719, telling the tale of a female Comanche warrior named Naru who comes up against a Yautja and ultimately defeats it, saving her tribe and becoming a War Chief in the process. The result was an incredibly compelling, tightly-knit, self-contained narrative that delivered all of the visceral thrills that Predator franchise fans could expect and more. That film ends with Naru getting a happy ending, but teases a foreboding future, through the presence of a certain pistol.
By the film end of Prey, Naru is in possession of a pistol with the words “Raphael Adolini 1715” etched into the side. However, Predator 2 ends with a Yautja giving that same pistol to Danny Glover’s Lieutenant Mike Harrigan as a sign of appreciation. Thus, fans were clued in that this would not be Naru’s last encounter with the alien race.
Trachtenberg’s own animated anthology film, Predator: Killer of Killers, took things even further earlier this year. That film ended with an epilogue which showed a number of franchise characters, including the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch and Amber Midhunter’s Naru, being kept on ice in stasis pods on a Yautja homeworld. This led many to speculate what exactly Trachtenberg and company could be setting up with this tease, and the director has now revealed that he does have big plans for characters like Naru, and that she almost found her way into Predator: Badlands.
When asked if the character was ever present in initial pitches for Badlands, Trachtenberg said, “I think there’s a bigger plan down the line. I did think about the pairing before it was Thia, but then I thought, ‘No, I’m not doing the premise.’ And I really wanted to do the premise of Predator is the protagonist and no humans in the movie. So it became something that further down the line, we can do some cooler things.”
It sounds like audiences are far from done seeing Naru’s journey, and she’s far from finished fighting the Yautja.
Predator: Badlands is out in theaters on November 7. Read our spoiler-free review here.