Most movie fans were surprised to hear we were getting not one, but two new Predator movies this year. We knew that Dan Trachtenberg, the director of Prey, was working on a live-action Predator movie with Elle Fanning. But then we heard, seemingly out of nowhere, that we were also getting an animated Predator movie. It’s called Predator: Killer of Killers, and it comes to Hulu June 6. Clearly, animated movies take some time, so this has been the plan all along, but we talked to both Trachtenberg and his co-director Josh Wassung about where this incredibly surprising and overly ambitious idea came from.
“After Prey, I was trying to figure out what I would potentially do with the sequel,” Trachtenberg told io9 via video chat. “So often the sequel is just ‘the next installment of the thing that was cool’ rather than being ‘a thing that is cool in and of itself.’ So it’s really forcing myself to figure out what could I possibly do that could be cool also in the Predator franchise or in the sci-fi space [in general]. Just me wanting to do a movie I could care about as much. And in thinking about that, three cool ideas came to mind. One of them is Predator: Badlands, which comes out in November. The other was Killer of Killers, and then the third is something that has yet to be made.”
With Badlands in November and Killer of Killers this week, it’s clear that executing those ideas meant Trachtenberg would have to make both movies at the same time. That meant bringing on some help, and he found that person in Josh Wassung. Wassung is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of the Third Floor, one of Hollywood’s leading visualization companies. He and Trachtenberg worked together on multiple projects, including Prey, and felt a spark of inspiration once the Third Floor began developing a pipeline to work in animation as well as live action.
“We were developing this new division of the company,” Wassung told io9. “I was showing [Trachtenberg] stuff and he would get just as excited as I got at it. We’re just like, ‘Man, this is gonna be so awesome.’ And then during one of those excited, nerding-out conversations, someone said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we made an animated Predator movie?’ And we were like, ‘Oh, that is almost too cool to hope for.’ Fast forward to after Prey and it did so well that it actually became a reality. And so he invited me to be co-director on the [animation and] technical side [as well as] the artistic side. And he’s bringing his franchise, live-action experience, and his storytelling expertise. And then we merged together.”
But saying “Wouldn’t it be cool if we made an animated Predator movie?” is just the first step. Killer of Killers is more than that. It’s three separate stories that seem like an anthology, and then come together to form one huge story. With Prey, Trachtenberg and his team saw that the idea of doing a Predator movie in a different time period worked. So, the idea of telling stories in three different time periods—one following a Viking raider, another a feudal Ninja, and the third a World War II pilot—was the easy part. It was that next part that really brought it all together.
“Truly, the great key turn was ‘Oh wait a second. It’s not three stories. It’s one story,’” Trachtenberg said. “First thinking of Twilight Zone: The Movie and then realizing, ‘No, no, there’s another kind of anthology.’ Pulp Fiction is also an anthology, and that really does feel like one story. So yeah, then the champions all coming together in an arena suddenly felt like ‘Wow, this gets wider at the end.’ It doesn’t just get bigger and longer, it gets wider and covers stuff that was already happening theoretically in the franchise that we didn’t even know about.”
We’ll dive a bit more into that statement later this week once people have seen the movie because, yes, Predator: Killer of Killers changes the Predator franchise in some radical new ways. One way it doesn’t change it, though, is in keeping with the DNA of the best Predator movies. It’s got great, visceral action. Lots of cool gadgets. Powerful characters on a personal journey. And, most importantly, it messes with audience expectations.
“It’s one movie that turns into another,” Trachtenberg said. “Predator starts out as… Rambo. I’m seeing an action movie in the jungle with [Arnold Schwarzenegger] fighting bad terrorists or whatever and then an alien creature shows up. So you’re in a movie, and then an alien creature shows up, and that’s very much a part of Killer of Killers and of course, Prey and in Badlands in a way that no one’s expecting.”
Another thing no one is expecting is that this animated Predator film would be so good. But it is. Check out Predator: Killer of Killers on Hulu June 6 and then swing back to io9 where we’ll talk about some of its biggest spoilers.
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