After years of rapidly degrading sequels and spin-offs, the Predator franchise has finally found a worthy overseer: Dan Trachtenberg.
First, the director blew everyone away with Prey, the prequel about a young Comanche woman who takes on the galaxy's deadliest hunter. Now, he returns with Predator: Killer of Killers, an animated anthology telling the story of three heroes from completely different eras who overcome personal struggles before facing off against the fierce Yautja.
Considering the limitlessness of animation, it took Trachtenberg some time to decide which exact three time periods his anthology would tackle. "The imagination goes crazy once you start," he tells GamesRadar+ over Zoom. "The idea of, 'Oh my gosh, wait a second, we could go to multiple time periods inside one movie? We could do something really fun.'"
Working with co-director Joshua Wassung, one of the founders of previsualisation and animation company The Third Floor, Trachtenberg quickly honed in on the specific stories he wanted to tell: the tale of a Viking warrior and her son; a ninja rejected by his Samurai brother; a Second World War pilot helping his comrades fight the enemy.
"Dan, initially, he knew he wanted to do a samurai versus ninja," Wassung says. "That was just something from childhood that you dream of being able to, like having toys fight in such really cool ways. And then you get to do that in animation, it's an interesting way to take a rad culture that's brutal and spin it just a little bit."
"Honestly, I think these are all just time periods that I'm inherently fascinated in," Trachtenberg adds. "The drive for me was to make sure we were not going to just smash action figures together, that it was going to be stories worth telling, because that was Prey to me. It was a fun movie to make because it was a historical drama and action film before the Predator even showed up. So I was trying to find that again.
"That funnelled us into the story about a mother on a quest to end this cycle of revenge she's on, and two brothers pitted against each other. Then, to be candid, World War 2 did not come from character initially; it came from, 'Oh my gosh, what if we do a movie where it's told almost entirely in the air, and the Predator never leaves that ship?' The way he functions on the ground normally is how he's going to function from his ship. Through that, we found this rootable character in Torres."
For Wassung, the most challenging aspect of making the three segments was getting the culture right for each setting. "We brought in some incredibly talented people, from stunts to language advisors to researchers and art department," he says. "Everyone was really putting their effort into making sure each of the cultures was true to – or at least rooted – in their reality, but then stylised from there.
"Like the sword fight in the ninja versus Samurai segment. It was so fun, but it was really challenging to make sure we did it properly. We had a sword expert record training videos on how to hold the sword properly and what it means to point the hilt at your opponent. We used those details, like there's a moment when he points the hilt of a sword off to the side. But that's on purpose, because that's supposed to be like this subtle message."
The result is a movie that GamesRadar+ has awarded a coveted five stars in our Predator: Killer of Killers review, with our reviewer calling it "an absolute must-watch." In other words, the Predator franchise certainly seems in good hands.
Predator: Killer of Killers is available on Hulu and Disney Plus from June 6.
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