Director Shane Black's upcoming film THE PREDATOR has been described as an "inventive sequel" to the original PREDATOR, and it's apparently so different from what we'd expect from a sequel that some cast members have even said it's not a sequel – it's a separate story that has connections to PREDATOR and PREDATOR 2. (Which means it's still a sequel in my book.)
One cast member, Thomas Jane, seems to have just revealed at least one of the unique aspects of the story Black crafted with his THE MONSTER SQUAD co-writer Fred Dekker. During an appearance on the Shadow Nation podcast, Jane described the set-up for the film's action, and it's definitely not something I would have thought we'd see in a PREDATOR follow-up.
Jane told the podcast's hosts 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."
That description matches up with the set photo of Jane sitting on a bus with co-stars Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Alfie Allen, Keegan-Michael Key, and Augusto Aguilera. My guess is that Holbrook is the guy who saw the Predator ships and the others are the soldiers he teams up with to fight the aliens, but we'll have to wait and see.
Also in the cast but not on that bus are Yvonne Strahovski, Jacob Tremblay, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, Jake Busey, and Edward James Olmos.
Jane says he had a blast working on the film, which has "that kind of Shane Black humor" and features Predators that look like "the same Predators as always". "They didn't f*ck those up."
THE PREDATOR is scheduled to be released on August 3rd, 2018.