Reshoots on Shane Black’s The Predator reworked the third act

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Last month, the cast and crew of director Shane Black's THE PREDATOR, which is said to be "an inventive sequel" to the 1987 sci-fi action classic PREDATOR, reconvened in Vancouver for seventeen days of reshoots. Speaking with CinemaBlend, cast member Keegan-Michael Key indicated that those reshoots were focused on substantially reworking the film's third act: 

We just finished last week, and just about three-quarters of the third act was rewritten."

Key went on to praise Black as "a consummate professional", calling him "one of our most vibrant writers of cinema".

While it is somewhat jarring to hear that so much of the film's third act had to be reworked (possibly enough to get an alternate ending included on the home video release?), here's hoping that these changes have fixed whatever issues the filmmakers had with the third act as originally shot and will make THE PREDATOR a more satisfying viewing experience than it might have been otherwise.

Scripted by Black and his THE MONSTER SQUAD collaborator Fred Dekker, THE PREDATOR doesn't have an official synopsis, but cast member Thomas Jane did say that he and other members of the ensemble 

play these veterans from like Afghanistan, Iraq war or whatever. But we’re all f*cking crazy so we go to the VA hospital to get our meds. We’re all like shellshocked, PTSD soldiers. We’re at the VA hospital and we’re in group therapy and of course, somebody flips out… this is back story, I don’t think we really see this… somebody flips out and we all get arrested and get thrown onto the bus to go down to the hospital and they throw this other guy on the bus, too. And he’s a guy they’ve actually marked to kill him because he’s seen a UFO, he’s seen the Predator ships come down, so they lock him up and throw him in with us lunatics. They’re going to take that bus, drive it down to a ditch and shoot us all just to get rid of this one guy. But, of course, we take the bus over and we’re all like ‘F*ck that man, let’s go kill these f*cking Predators ourselves’ and we’re just crazy enough to believe that this guy really did see a UFO and there’s these aliens out there."

Key and Jane's co-stars include Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera, Yvonne Strahovski, Jacob Tremblay, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, and Edward James Olmos, with Jake Busey as the son of the character his father Gary Busey played in PREDATOR 2.

THE PREDATOR is scheduled to reach theatres on September 14, 2018.