After taking fans back centuries with his critically acclaimed Prey, director Dan Trachtenberg has upended what a Predator movie can be once more with Predator: Badlands, turning villain into hero as it centers a more human, more compassionate Yautja. Bloodthirsty franchise loyalists may not appreciate the big swing, but if you're okay with throwing the rulebook – or should we say, 'Yautja Codex' – out, the result is a highly enjoyable, Mandalorian-esque adventure that swaps horror for humor.
It isn't, it turns out, a secret Alien vs. Predator film either, or even setting one up in fact, despite Elle Fanning playing Weyland-Yutani synths Tessa and Thia and its nods to Power Loaders and Xenomorph-fighting comic book character Broken Tusk. It's a pretty self-contained flick that keeps its "elegant" connectivity to the Alien Universe at a minimum, bringing Dek's arc full circle as he pushes back against his kind's ancient traditions and forges his own identity.
It's perhaps more straightforward than most will have been expecting, in that case, with no big reveals or twists and turns along the way. But there's still a lot going on in the final act, and we certainly wouldn't blame you if you missed something in the action-packed chaos. Fortunately, we've broken down the Predator: Badlands ending below, so you don't have to spend the next few weeks hunting the web for clues as to whether Bud made it out alive or Thia managed to get her legs back… Major spoilers within!
Predator: Badlands ending recap
Having escaped the clutches of Tessa and her fellow Weyland-Yutani droids, Dek returns to the destroyed camp and discovers that Bud is actually the offspring of the Kalisk he wanted to turn into a trophy. With that, he sets out to rescue Thia, free the Kalisk and reunite it with Bud – defying the Yautja Codex that states their kind are "friend to none". First, he fashions weapons out of Genna's dangerous flora and fauna, turning its exploding worms into grenades, its razor grass into claws, and its needled flowers into poisonous, paralyzing darts. Then he retrieves Thia's legs, and makes his way to Weyland-Yutani's base.
There, he and Bud take out Tessa's right-hand men in increasingly elaborate set-pieces while Thia's legs find, well, Thia's top half. Thinking that Thia has been powered down, the mistakenly relaxed guards get distracted by the limbs, as they wrestle them to the ground by the neck, while a conscious Tessa breaks out of her containment. The pair then rendezvous with Bud and Dek, who unleash the Kalisk on Tessa. The bot has pre-empted the attack, though, and comes at the creature in a Power Loader-type exo-suit. They brawl, though the face-off ultimately ends with the Kalisk eating Tessa.
The day looks saved for a short while, but eagle-eyed viewers will likely remember that Tessa pocketed Dek's freeze grenades earlier on in the movie... Not fully digested yet, she detonates the weapon inside the Kalisk, turning the creature into a big ol' block of ice before it shatters into tiny pieces.
A seriously damaged Tessa emerges from the wreckage and sets her sights on Thia. She waves a gun at her "sister", spouting some lecture about Weyand-Yutani's good intentions and how Thia's optimism and empathy make her weak (parallels, much?). Unfortunately for Tessa, Dek manages to sneak up on the bot from behind and stabs her with his plasma sword. He then... decapitates her off-screen and takes her head back to his homeworld to present to his father as a trophy; in the hopes the latter will finally grant him a combat cloak and other warrior-worthy tools.
Disappointed his son didn't manage to bring back a Kalisk skull, Dek's father Njhorr rejects his request, which leads Dek to challenge his dad to a duel. Njhorr sets his patrolmen on Dek first, which the youngster dispatches with ease, before containing Njhorr with his plasma lasso. Amazed at his son's newfound strength, Njhorr urges Dek to yield and fight alongside him, which prompts Dek to inform his father that he has no need for a clan anymore since he's found his own. Bud – now much larger – bites off Njhorr's head, and Dek and Thia gather around him.
In the distance, a spaceship lowers itself into view along the dusty horizon. "Friends of yours?" Thia asks. "My mother," Dek replies, and the film cuts to black.
Why did Weyland-Yutani want the Kalisk?
It's revealed towards the end of the movie that the Kalisk has major regenerative abilities – a large reason why the many-fanged beast is so hard to kill. You slice a bit of it off? It'll simply grow another limb to replace the missing one. Weyland-Yutani wants to capture the creature and, essentially, bottle said power, making shedloads of dosh as it changes the face of bio-science forever.
It's much like what Morrow and the crew aboard the ill-fated USCSS Maginot were tasked to do by Weyland-Yutani in Noah Hawley's Disney Plus series Alien: Earth; retrieve alien specimens to research, use as weapons (Xenomorphs, specifically on that one), or simply to "build better worlds".
Unfortunately, the Kalisk doesn't make it to the end credits. But little did Tessa know, Bud is the same species – and in the film's pre-credits scene, she's already looking a bit bigger and beefier like her mama.
Is Dek "Broken Tusk"?
Dek isn't confirmed to be "Broken Tusk", a Yautja from Dark Horse's Predator comics in Badlands, despite the characters both having damaged lower-left fangs. We're not ready to give up on the popular fan theory just yet, though, thanks to a moment in the movie where Dek vaguely references how he lost his tooth...
Early on in the film, Dek's brother Kwei approaches him in their clan's trophy room and laughs when he sees him playing with a child's toy. The two then briefly reminisce about the item, agreeing that they haven't really looked at it since Dek saved Kwei's life some years ago. Dek then suggests that that's when he injured his mandible, though the pair don't dwell on the details...
In the comics, "Broken Tusk", otherwise known as Yeyinde, got his name after a fight with a Xenomorph. Could it be the case that a young Dek and Kwei were attacked by one of the gooey, big-skulled beasts?
"I think we are drawing on so much inspiration from all the characters of the comics," Trachtenberg explained at MCM London Comic-Con shortly before Predator: Badlands release. "I don't know that I've been as interested in doing, like, direct reimaginings of issues of comics and characters from them. But we are certainly drawing so much more inspiration from the comics, especially with this film, and Killer of Killers as well, more so than we have ever before in any of the movies."
Does Dek return to Yautja Prime, and whose ship is that at the end of the movie?
Dek leaves Genna and returns to Yautja Prime at the end of Predator: Badlands, but not to redeem himself in the eyes of his father as originally planned. Instead, Dek presents Tessa's head as a trophy; an offering his father quickly dismisses, reminding Dek that he had vowed to slay the Kalisk.
He challenges his father, skillfully fighting off his cronies and subduing him, prompting his pops to say: "Maybe the right son survived after all. Yield, and come take your rightful place in your clan." Dek tells his dad he's already found his clan and kills him, avenging his brother Kwei, who was murdered by their father for saving his life in the movie's violent prologue.
In the pre-credits scene, as Dek, Thia, and Bud smile at one another, a large ship appears from nowhere in the distance. "Friends of yours?" Thia asks, to which Dek replies: "My mother." Cut to black. It's hard to know whether it's just a gag – you know, a "You thought Dek's dad was mean, wait 'til you meet his mother" joke? – or genuine set-up for a sequel, but it's an intriguing moment nevertheless.
Is there a Xenomorph in Predator: Badlands?
No, there are no Xenomorphs in Predator: Badlands. There's not even an egg or a Facehugger, for that matter...
"It felt, to me, like there was a way to include things in cinematic universes that are already spiritually connected and involve them in one story, in one movie," Trachtenberg previously told GamesRadar+, noting that he didn't want Badlands to feel like "action figures smashing together".
"We just took Weyland-Yutani, we just took the synths, and that's cooler than it being like, 'It's the big thing versus the big thing from the franchise'. We thought there was just something a little bit more elegant about that," adds Trachtenberg. "Maybe further down the line, it can grow into a bigger thing. But it's cooler, to me, that it's just these little different touch points that make it all feel like a connected universe. And if all of it is new to you, you don't need to have done any homework. It could just be a rad movie that makes sense on its own."
Is Prey's Naru in Predator: Badlands?
No, Naru, Amber Midthunder's character from 2022's Prey, doesn't appear in Predator: Badlands – though there was a brief moment in the making of the movie where she was going to be Dek's ally and not Thia.
"I would say there's a bigger plan down the line," Trachtenberg told Dexerto, when asked about Naru's cameo in Predator: Killer of Killers and subsequently surprising absence in Predator: Badlands. "I did think about the pairing of [Naru and Dek] before it was Thia, but then I thought, 'Well, now, then I'm not doing the premise.' And I really wanted to do the premise: the Predator's the protagonist and no humans in the movie. And so it became, further down the line we can do some cooler things, maybe."
Will there be a Predator: Badlands 2?
As it stands, there has been no official announcement of a Predator: Badlands follow-up, though Dan Trachtenberg has publicly stated that he already has a pitch for a third live-action movie.
"After Prey came out, and I started thinking about sequel stuff, there were three ideas that I had. Killers is one, Badlands is two and the third one is something else," he previously told SFX magazine. "The reason why I felt possessed to make them and sort of why I rushed – I did two at once because I could do, I could multitask with animation – was because I was so eager to get to the third thing.
"There's a lot of cool ideas out there and none of them are just like, 'Oh, we have to say the next part of this story because it was successful.' All of it is like, 'Whoa, no one has done that in sci-fi. No one has done that in Predator. No one's done that with the creature'. All of those ideas are generated from that instinct. So, yeah, there is definitely a third thing that I'd love to get to when Badlands is finished."
Given Badlands' Weyland-Yutani links, many had assumed the "third thing" was an Alien vs. Predator movie, but given Trachtenberg's approach to Prey, Killer of Killers, and Badlands, it seems fair to assume that the next installment could shake things up yet again. Over the last few months, there have been whisperings of Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to the franchise and "something bigger" when it comes to Trachtenberg's Alien/Predator crossovers. Only time will tell what 20th Century Studios has in store for the ever-expanding cinematic universe...
Predator: Badlands is in cinemas now. For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies in 2025 and beyond, or our guide on how to watch the Predator movies in order.
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