The “Predator: Killer of Killers” Trailer is…Killer

(This is the poster for Predator: Killer of Killers.) 

Well, this isn’t what I expected to come out of the Predator franchise after Prey (2022). An animated anthology film from the same director as Prey (2022). I think a lot of people when they first saw this trailer, initially thought that it was a series, sort of like Marvel’s What If…?, but when they realized that it was a movie and an anthology movie at that, they got a little bit more intrigued. We have not had an animated Predator project of any kind, movie or otherwise until now. 

 

 

 

 

(This is the cover art for Predator: Concrete Jungle.) 

 

 

 

 

The closest thing we’ve gotten to something approximating that before Predator: Killer of Killers are the video games, specifically the Predator game called Predator: Concrete Jungle. Where you actually play as a Predator (Yautja is their actual species name) as he must go back to Earth 🌎 after he was banished by his own clan for a failed hunt to recover technology that was stolen from him by humans during that failed hunt (getting his tech stolen is the main reason why he’s banished and reprimanded), who then reverse engineered it and used it to create a futuristic metropolis out of it. Human technology has advanced hundreds, if not thousands of years thanks to the Predator technology that was left behind and stolen from that failed hunt, at least in this one city, and it’s up to this one Predator to correct his mistake and destroy everything that this crime lord created using the stolen Predator tech. 

 

Oh, and there’s some Xenomorphs in there too, but make no mistake, this is not an Alien vs. Predator game (or I guess Aliens vs. Predator since that’s what the crossover sub franchise was called up until Paul W.S. Anderson made his film), it is a Predator game through and through. The Xenomorphs just make a guest appearance as a side enemy (an extra enemy type) that you encounter in the game, just as a little Easter egg or nod to show that these two still exist in the same universe. But, they are certainly not the main focus or main enemy type in the game. The developers and publisher behind the game did a pretty decent job at hiding their presence in the game so that it would be a surprise to players when they played the game and got to that part where the Xenomorphs appear. 

I still would like to see a Predator movie or a Predator series that is entirely from the Predator’s point-of-view, where the Predator is the protagonist rather than the antagonist. The best parts of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (AVPR) were the parts focused on Wolf, the Cleaner Predator who’s sent down to Earth 🌎 to wipe out the Xenomorph infestation in Gunnison, Colorado caused by the Predator ship from the first movie crashing down in a forest 🌲 near the town because of the PredAlien that was born from Scar, the last surviving Predator from the first Alien vs. Predator (AVP) (the one directed by Paul W.S. Anderson) killing almost all of the Predators on board, before it spirals out of control and wipes out the entire human race. It almost makes you wish the whole movie was from Wolf’s perspective, but they cut back to him a decent amount in the film, and he became easily the best Predator character in the entire franchise. At least in the movie side of the franchise. 

 

 

 

 

(This is a production still of the Predator character, Wolf in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem.) 

 

 

 

 

 

Predator fans really like Wolf, he’s a fan favorite, even if like every Predator before and after him, he still lost. He still died at the end. But, you could look at it another way. You could still say that he won in the end since he was mission to wipe out the Xenomorph infestation caused by the PredAlien and escaped Facehuggers and prevent the extinction of the human race, and he succeeded at that, even if he wasn’t the one who struck the final blow and it ended up costing him his life as well as the lives of everyone still left in Gunnison when the bomb ☢️ was dropped. You could tell that the Brothers Strause were much bigger Predator fans than Alien fans, just like how you could tell that Paul W.S. Anderson was a bigger Alien fan than a Predator fan. 

It’s about time that they’ve done a Predator movie entirely from a Predator’s perspective. The fans have been wanting it for a long, and so far, outside of the games and the comics, it hasn’t been done. None of the films have dared try it. It’s too weird and out there for Hollywood I guess, they don’t think audiences would accept a Predator movie where a Predator is the main character and there aren’t any humans, or there are few humans. You can still have humans just have them be the antagonists, as our Predator protagonist chases after them and hunts them down and kills them one by one, or all in go like in Predator 2 where the City Hunter (which is what the Predator in that film is called) massacred that whole room of Jamaican gang members 🇯🇲 or the scene where he massacred all those people on that subway train 🚇, all of those criminals and commuters armed with guns acting in self-defense as well as Lambert (Bill Paxton’s character in that movie). They also haven’t done a Predator movie with a female Predator ♀︎, which the fans have also been interested in seeing for…reasons 😏. The Predator game, Predator: Hunting Grounds featured a female Yautja ♀︎, and I think the comics have featured some female Preds ♀︎, but that’s about it. None of the films have featured one.

Unfortunately, that is not what this movie is, and it is a movie. Like I said, there was some confusion when this trailer came out about whether or not it was a series or a movie. Frankly, I’ve been confused about that too with some stuff on streaming. Like, when I saw the trailer to that new Apple TV+ show with John Hamm, Your Friends & Neighbors. I thought initially while I was watching the trailer that it was movie, and I was actually kind of interested in watching it, you know a crime comedy movie starring John Hamm, that should be interesting 🤔. But, once I figured out that it was series and not a movie, I immediately lost interest 😒. So, it is hard to tell when something’s a show or movie when it comes streaming. That’s why streaming sucks, and probably shouldn’t have even been invented. 

 

BTW, Your Friends & Neighbors gives me some serious Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) vibes, like when I was watching that trailer, I couldn’t help but think of the 2005 remake of Fun with Dick and Jane with Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni. This show has pretty much the same premise as Fun with Dick and Jane, where a rich business person 🤑 loses their lucrative job (they get fired for very little justifiable reasons) and they end up turning to crime in order to try to stay afloat, pay the bills, put food on the table, and so what. They start stealing money 💵, or jewelry or some other expensive item they can sell to use to pay for the things they want or need, or even just straight up shoplift. The only difference here with Your Friends & Neighbors is that it’s just the one guy ♂︎ (John Hamm) that becomes a thief, rather than a husband and wife duo like in Fun with Dick and Jane (2005). Oh, and going by the trailer, it seems like John Hamm’s character mostly just steals jewelry from rich people 🤑’s homes rather than cash 💵 like Dick and Jane do. 

This definitely looks like it could be a series, and probably would’ve been a series had it been made anyone else. I bet it was one of those things where Disney wanted to just make it a series like What If?…, but Dan Trachtenberg, being a movie director and being a movie guy ♂︎ in general, fought for it to be a movie and managed to actually get his wish since Prey (2022) was so good and more importantly was so successful 🤑. I’m glad that this is a movie and not a series, it would’ve been so easy to just make it series, but Trachtenberg didn’t take the easy route and decided to take the tougher job of making an anthology film out of Predator, an animated anthology at that. 

 

You really don’t see that many anthology films nowadays. The only recent anthology film that immediately comes to mind is Freaky Tales, which came out a couple of weeks ago. But that was a live action anthology film, not an animated one like Predator: Killer of Killers is. What If?… probably should’ve been an anthology film, not that the writing and animation were up to movie standards. I also wish that there was an Animatrix sequel. They were planning on making one, there were plans to make a new Animatrix movie after The Matrix Resurrections came out, but it was canceled after Resurrections’s failure in theaters and on HBO Max (back when it was still called HBO Max 😒). 

This will be another human vs. Predator movie, and it will be from the humans’ perspective. There are at least three stories, three different shorts, in this movie, and they all focus on different characters (different kinds of warriors) facing off against a Predator in different time periods and different countries/continents. There’s a story involving Vikings fighting against a Predator, there’s a story about samurai fighting against a Predator, and a story set during World War II about an Allied fighter pilot facing off against a Predator in a spaceship. The two stories that I would say I’m the most interested in are the samurai story and the World War II story. 

 

I honestly could care less about the Viking story, and honestly wish that it wasn’t even here. Replace it with something else, like a story set in the modern day, or closer to modern way, like a Predator hunting soldiers fighting in Iraq 🇮🇶 or Afghanistan 🇦🇫. I mean, AVPR featured an Iraq War veteran 🇮🇶 as a main character, so why not? Plus, it would be interesting to see a Predator in a desert 🏜️. They could even call it the Desert Hunter 🏜️. I even think there’s a fan art as well as a figurine of this sort of thing online, of a Predator wearing more desert equipment. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(This is the piece of fan art and the figure that I was talking about depicting a Predator that actually hunts in the desert. The piece of fan art that you see on top is actually entitled “Predator 3 Concept,” and it was the artist, Ronniesolano’s idea of what a Predator 3 should look like. He even said in the description that it would be set in Iraq 🇮🇶 like I said, except he said Operation Desert Storm rather than the Iraq War 🇮🇶 like I said, which would be Operation Iraqi Freedom 🇮🇶. He also suggested that Dwayne Johnson—who he still called The Rock—be in it, which, man, I wonder how he feels about Dwayne Johnson now 😬.) 

But seeing a Predator in World War II, even if it looks to just be in a spaceship, is the next best thing and is a real treat. I remember seeing that one Predator fan film about a bunch of World War II soldiers, both American and Japanese 🇺🇸🇯🇵, being hunted by a Predator on an island in the Pacific, so seeing this sort of thing be done in an official capacity is pretty cool. And for what it’s worth, it is interesting to see a Predator hunt using a spaceship only and never getting out of it (as far as we know). It almost kind of makes you want to see a Predator use a submarine (or some kind of submersible) to hunt…presumably sharks 🦈 and other sea creatures they deem worthy of hunting. These are things that the comics and other ancillary material and the fans have already been doing for a long time, and now the films are just barely catching up. And it’s cool to see a Predator go against some samurai, that’s a matchup fans have been wanting to see for a long time, and people just like Japanese stuff 🇯🇵 in general, including me. 

I would say the thing that I have the biggest complaint about besides the designs of the Predators (which I’ll get to), is the animation and art style. I try not to fixate too much on animation and art style when I talk about an animated project, whether it be a movie or a series, especially if it’s competently made, and I really focus on it when I have nothing else to really talk about, but I have to comment on the animation and art style here because it is ugly. I do not like at all. In fact, the animation and art style might be the things that keep me from watching this movie. 

 

It’s that same 3D animation that tries to mimic the look of 2D animation thing that I’ve grown sick of because it’s so prevalent. Like, as the comments underneath this trailer pointed out, it’s the type of animation in the Arcane series and Blue Eye Samurai, that other adult animated Netflix series that was really popular from 2023 that was nominated for five Emmys and won four. I’ve also seen this kind of animation and art style in Gamera: Rebirth, a show I absolutely detested and couldn’t finish 😤, What If?…, and the Godzilla: Monster Planet trilogy, but those are even more cell shaded than Arcane or Blue Eye Samurai. 

 

But, this movie looks closer to Arcane and Blue Eye Samurai than those other ones I named. And I hate it 😤, absolutely hate it 🤬. It’s why I refuse to watch those two shows. Why can’t 3D animation just look like 3D animation and why can’t we have 2D animation that is actual 2D animation and looks like 2D animation, none of hybrid nonsense. Most of it doesn’t look good. It either looks choppy or it looks too smooth, there’s no in-between. Here, it kind of leans on looking choppy, and I’m not here for it. I would’ve preferred if this was just regular 2D animated or if it was 3D animated and actually looked 3D, rather than trying to mimic to 2D animation. Studios, filmmakers, if you’re reading this, stop doing this 3D/2D animation hybrid mimicry bullshit and give us one or the other, or in the case of 2D animation, only use 3D assets for things that would otherwise be too time consuming to do hand drawn. Sort of like what both Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet did. It’s tiring, and it doesn’t look good. It looks cheap as well 👎. 

Since I touched on the animation, I guess I should touch on the Predator designs, which I’m really not crazy about at all. I don’t mind the fact that the Predators are all different sizes and different body types depending on type of warrior they’re fighting, I actually think that’s a cool detail given that this is animation. The Predator going up against the Vikings is more muscular, the Predator going up against the samurai is more sleek and slender, and the Predator going up against the World War II pilots is in-between those two extremes. That’s fine. The problem I have is with the designs of the faces and the biomasks. 

 

 

 

 

(This is the poster for Prey (2022).)

 

 

 

 

As much as I liked Prey (2022), one thing I didn’t like was the design of the Predator and its face, how the mandibles were even further apart from the mouth ever before couldn’t cover the mouth, how the mouth almost seemed like it was wide open most of the time, and the biomask that only covered half the face. And just the face in general, I thought was pretty ugly, and not in a good way. Not in a “you’re one ugly motherfucker” kind of way, no, ugly in that it looks bad. It’s a bad design. Prey (2022) by far had the worst Predator face of the entire franchise, even worse than the Predator face in AVP (2004). Even the Ultimate Predator in The Predator looked better than the Predator in Prey (2022). Which, by the way, I should probably get to The Predator someday, even if I don’t really want to, but it’s gotta be done eventually. And who knows? Maybe I might actually like it, however unlikely that is. 

And since is from the same director as Prey (2022), and is very much a follow up to that movie, the Predators here, largely look the same as the one in that movie. The Samurai Hunter Predator as I’ll call him has pretty much the same looking mask and body type as the so-called “Feral Predator” in Prey (2022). The Viking Hunter Predator doesn’t even have a mask, it looks he’s going at it without a mask, but he has that same face that every other Predator besides the good ol’ Jungle Hunter and City Hunter had, where the mandibles don’t close and are on the side of the mouth and are just glorified tusks. Completely ignored or forgetting what the original biological purpose of the mandibles was. And Dan Trachtenberg has another Predator project coming up after this called Predator: Badlands, which is in live action and is actual real follow up to Prey (2022) (Predator: Killer of Killers was the “secret” project he was working on in-between those two movies), so we’ll keep seeing this design philosophy for the Predator be repeated in that movie. And I just hate it. I do not like it. 

None of the Predator movies after Predator 2 have been able to nail the mandibles, and have fundamentally misunderstood what their purpose even was when Stan Winston originally came up with the design. They’re meant to cover the mouth, protect it from outside abrasions and keep it moist, they’re basically a stand-in for lips 👄, they’re the Yautja species’ equivalent to lips 👄. They’re not just window dressing or things meant to make the Predator look more intimidating like every other Predator thing since then seems to think, and CORDZ is the only other person online point this out as a design flaw in every Predator movie after Predator 2, the last Predator movie that Stan Winston worked on with his studio. He stopped at The Predator and didn’t cover Prey (2022) since that movie hadn’t came out yet he made his video on this topic (it had just barely got announced), and The Predator was then, the most recent thing to come out of the Predator franchise. 

Also, I saw at least one comment saying that they’re hoping that in at least one of the stories, the Predator wins in the end, and I couldn’t agree more. Having the Predator(s) lose to the humans every single time kind of diminishes their status and title as the deadliest hunters in the galaxy and takes away their menace and threat level if a regular ol’ human can just take them out so easy. If they can get outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and even outgunned sometimes by a human every single time they hunt humans. Why even bother hunting humans at all if every hunt is unsuccessful and ends with the Predator’s death? 

 

It’s also very formulaic, like every Predator movie has followed this same formula where a Predator shows up, kills all of the supporting characters and unimportant side or background characters, leaving only one survivor, our main protagonist who’s the most badass amongst them, and it’s them who ends up taking down the Predator in one final confrontation. It’s gotten kind of tired and stale, and they really need to shake things up. So, if this movie is to actually be good and standout amongst the other Predator movies, they should have one story where the Predator wins and the humans lose. I mean, it’s an anthology film, and not every story needs to end with a “happy ending,” or have the main human protagonist survive by the end. 

Speaking of things coming out of this franchise, I will still probably check this one out, even if I’m crazy about the animation or art style, and I don’t care for the Predator designs. I’m a huge Predator fan, and I’m willing to give anything new that comes out of this franchise, except Shane Black’s The Predator, but even then I might swallow my pride and give it a watch and a review at least once. I do wish that other directors and animators got a chance to contribute shorts to this anthology film, and that it wasn’t all Dan Trachtenberg, like I wish they took a similar approach as The Animatrix or Halo Legends, where it was a different animated short by a different filmmaker or animation studio, and each had a different story and art style. That way we could get more variety. Maybe they could’ve even fit in more than just three stories, maybe four, or five, or, six. Maybe even seven, eight, or nine. 

 

I also hope that someone else besides Dan Trachtenberg gets to direct a Predator movie in the future, and he isn’t the only guiding force for this franchise going forward. Just like how Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t the only guiding force, in fact, after the first movie, he wasn’t a guiding force at all and that was to the franchise’s benefit. We’ve seen with Terminator what happens when Schwarzenegger ties himself to an ongoing franchise and it can’t seem to shake him off or move past him, even if it would be better without him at this point. I don’t want that to happen to Predator, but on the director side of things either. 

 

It dodged a bullet with Shane Black, oh, boy did it dodge a bullet because Shane Black was not the guy ♂︎ to guide Predator in a new and exciting direction. I already knew he wasn’t fit, I already didn’t really like him after he made Iron Man 3, which I absolutely hated 🤬. I liked The Nice Guys ♂︎, and it almost endeared me to him, but The Predator made me doubt him once again. He probably should’ve just directed a sequel to The Nice Guys ♂︎ instead of making The Predator, ruining his career, ruining his reputation, and people’s perception of him. Predator fans hate Shane Black now, just as much as Star Wars fans hate JJ Abrams (and Rian Johnson), Alien fans hate Ridley Scott, and Star Trek fans hate Alex Kurtzman. 

 

I’ve only barely decided to give Shane Black another chance with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 💋 and the movies he wrote in the 90s like The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight. But, I still don’t want Dan Trachtenberg to take over the franchise completely and be its only guiding force. Predator should always have a different variety of people working on it, so that it always stays fresh and never stagnates. So, after Predator: Badlands, I hope Trachtenberg drops it and lets someone else come in and direct a Predator movie. One that’s different from the ones he’s making. Oh, and can we please get another theatrically released Predator movie? I don’t want to see Predator become a franchise that’s just relegated to streaming, it deserves to be in theaters again. If Alien could have a theatrically released movie with Alien: Romulus, I don’t see why Predator can’t. Predator, like Alien, was made for the movie theater, not the small screen on digital streaming. 

Also, since I mentioned two other trailers I watched besides the ones for this movie and Tron: Ares in the foreword my Godzilla vs. Kong review, I want to quickly mention that I watched the trailers to the movies Gator Creek 🐊 AKA The Bayou and Primitive War and have intentions of watching and reviewing them. Gator Creek 🐊 AKA The Bayou already came out back in February and is basically a killer alligator movie 🐊 that is about this group of tourists who get trapped in the Florida bayou (just as the alternate title suggests) and end up at the mercy of man-eating alligators 🐊. And Primitive War is an upcoming Vietnam War 🇻🇳 movie about a group of American soldiers 🇺🇸 going up against dinosaurs. Yes, dinosaurs. 

 

Someone actually thought, “what if we put dinosaurs in Vietnam 🇻🇳?” And made a movie based on that basic idea. It’s crazy and it’s bonkers. These seem like the perfect movies for me to watch and cover on my blog, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do if I can find a way to watch them. Stream them or buy a copy or something. And since I’m doing Gator Creek 🐊 AKA The Bayou, I might as well cover Crawl (2019), another killer alligator movie 🐊, except it’s set in a person’s house (in their crawl space to be exact) and it’s during a hurricane 🌀 in where else? Florida. I’ve already seen Crawl (2019), and I liked it, it’s a good movie. If I review it for this blog, it’ll be a rewatch for me. If you want to see those trailers, click on the links here and here. 

 

 

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(This is the trailer to Predator: Killer or Killers.)