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The newest addition to the Predator franchise takes the series into an interesting new direction. By making the Predator, who has always been cast as the monstrous villain of the series up until now, into the protagonist, Predator: Badlands changes the dynamic that we as an audience have with the titular alien. According to director Dan Trachtenberg, a familiar image from the beloved Star Wars series involving Chewbacca and C-3PO.

At MCM London 2025, Dan Trachtenberg talked about how he came up with the overall plot of Predator: Badlands.

“It began after making Prey, which was a very sort of back-to-basics, true to the very root of the franchise movie, and thinking about what we could possibly make next, and really trying not to think ‘What could we make?’ but ‘What should we make?’ Like, what is a movie beyond just the Predator franchise that does not exist that I want to see, and I really feel like we all really want to see, and that became the idea of making a movie about the monster. About the creature we’ve, you know?"

 "We’ve all fallen in love with a lot of sidekicks and villains over the years, and they’ve never really had their own movie," Trachtenberg continues, "and so the big idea was what if the Predator had its own movie, so yeah, that’s the genesis of Badlands.”

Something that they felt was really important was not relying on the crutch of putting a human in the movie.

 “It was honestly, feeling like if we put a human in the movie, we’re really gonna be tempted, creatively as we’re developing it, but also as an audience member, we’re gonna start to really link up with them and it’s gonna start to be less of this big idea of like ‘What if the Predator was a protagonist?’ and it’s just gonna be like what any old franchise has done before.”

This is where Star Wars came into it. In Predator: Badlands, the Predator is joined by a Weyland-Yutani synth, played by Elle Fanning, who has become damaged. The two spend much of the movie with Fanning’s character, Thia, strapped to the Predator’s back as they traverse the dangerous landscape together.  

“So, in thinking about no humans, it was like what if it’s a movie about a monster and a robot, and then I thought, ‘I know a company that makes robots,’ which is Weyland-Yutani from the Alien franchise. And so, very quickly after that, the idea of the silhouette, the Chewbacca with C-3PO on his back silhouette of the Predator and a severed synth came to mind.”

So the core concept of Predator: Badlands, which is the Predator running around the wilderness with a damaged synth on its back, owes much of its inspiration to the classic image of Chewbacca running around with a damaged C-3PO on his back in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

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