I was never much of a fan of Predator (except that time he fought Archie), but I understand his appeal. He's a big, awesome, hulking monster with cool sci-fi guns. It's just, while the first film was some dumb fun, none of the other sequels really came close to the same quality. And it honestly created diminishing returns for the character, in my opinion.
However, that all might change with Shane Black's upcoming THE PREDATOR. I've gone on record to not enjoying his IRON MAN 3, but I've pretty much loved everything else he's written (I still quote THE LAST BOYSCOUT), so I'm pretty excited about this. And it looks like we finally have some more confirmation about the story, via one of the film's star Thomas Jane, during an interview with the podcast Shadow Nation:
We play these veterans from like Afghanistan, Iraq war or whatever. But we’re all fucking 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 backstory, 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 “fuck that man, let’s go kill these fucking 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. So that’s kinda cool!
Sounds fun. Besides the suburban angle, I like the idea of damaged soldiers – rather than roided up supermen – being the protagonists. I wonder how they'll fit the second film – which was a slight dystopia (set in the then future year of 1997) – into the canon of this film? I guess we'll find out.
Meanwhile, THE PREDATOR will stalk theaters August 13th, 2018.