Dan Trachtenberg Already Planning His Next Hunt After ‘Predator Badlands’

The Yautja are not slowing down. With ‘Predator Badlands’ now out in theaters and the animated ‘Predator Killer of Killers’ still fresh in fans’ minds, it looks like the franchise is in the middle of a busy new chapter, not wrapping one up. Director Dan Trachtenberg seems to be treating this run of stories as the start of something much bigger.

‘Predator Badlands’ flips the classic setup by putting a young outcast Predator named Dek in the spotlight and pairing him with Thia, a damaged Weyland Yutani synth, on a bleak frontier world. Instead of a simple monster movie, the film leans into character and emotion while keeping the creature feature thrills, following on from the stripped back survival approach of ‘Prey’ and the more sprawling anthology feel of ‘Predator Killer of Killers’.

What fans might not realize is that Trachtenberg has been playing a longer game. After finishing ‘Prey’, he started mapping out a trio of stories set in this universe. As he put it, “Killers is one, Badlands is two and the third one is something else.” That last idea is still under wraps, but it is already influencing how he talks about the future of the series.

To get there, he pushed hard on the two projects we are seeing now. Trachtenberg openly admitted, “I sort of rushed two at once because I was so eager to get to the third thing”. The key was that one of them was animated, which made it possible for him to juggle ‘Predator Killer of Killers’ in post while moving ‘Predator Badlands’ through live action production, letting both pipelines run side by side.

‘Predator Killer of Killers’ lays a lot of groundwork. As an animated anthology, it jumps across different eras and corners of the cosmos, connecting past human heroes and new Yautja stories in ways that feel tailor made for a bigger saga. ‘Predator Badlands’ then narrows the focus again, digging into Dek’s family drama and Yautja culture and introducing threads like Weyland Yutani tech that quietly hint at a wider sci fi tapestry waiting off screen.

That mysterious third idea seems to be where everything could converge. Trachtenberg has said that none of his plans are just about cashing in on a hit, and that his pitches come from trying things genre fans have not seen before with this kind of creature. He has teased that the yet unannounced story would follow up on a human hero from ‘Prey’, which has naturally kicked off plenty of guesswork about what a full on follow up might look like.

For now, the director is letting ‘Predator Killer of Killers’ and ‘Predator Badlands’ speak for themselves. Both show a filmmaker experimenting with tone, form and point of view while still delivering the kind of sharp weapons and tense hunts that brought people to this series in the first place. If he was willing to make two ambitious projects at once just to clear the path, whatever comes next is clearly the story he has been chasing all along.

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