One of the many hallmarks of the Predator franchise is brutality. When one of the eponymous extraterrestrials in the movies takes out an opponent, it’s not doing it by slipping poison into their drink or pushing them down a flight of stairs. They are more about evisceration, limb removal, and ripping out skulls and spines to keep as trophies. That being said, there may be panic among the die-hard fans that the upcoming Predator: Badlands is a blockbuster that was made aiming for a PG-13 – but those same folks should rest assured that the filmmakers still make a special effort to make it as gruesome and gory as possible.
What To Expect From The Gore In Predator: Badlands
I first learned about Predator: Badlands’ targeted rating last summer when I joined a group of other journalists for a trip to the set of the film amid production down in Auckland, New Zealand. At the start of the day, we got an extended introduction to the project from producer Ben Rosenblatt (who previously produced the critically acclaimed Prey in 2022), and when he was asked about the blood and gore content of the movie, he explained the movie’s nuanced approach to that arena:
I think our hope here actually, our goal here is to be able to do all the blood as alien or synth blood. So like what you saw here, I think if you're referring to like the purple blood during an action sequence. We have white synth milk, which is classic. We have other forms of it – we have the Yautja green blood, of course. We don't have any humans in the movie, and so we don't have any human red blood.
What Rosenblatt was saying without outright stating it is that Predator: Badlands is taking advantage of a loophole in the standards of the Motion Picture Association’s ratings. Extreme violence is typically only penalized if it is accompanied by gore and blood… but only human blood. Characters can spend 120 minutes slaying monsters and robots and getting bathed in multicolor goo, and that movie can still get a PG-13 rating because it’s not viewed as traumatizing for younger viewers.
This is a standard that works for Predator: Badlands because, as noted, there are no human characters in the film. The new movie is set deep into the future of the Predator/Alien canon, and it is the first feature in the franchise to feature a Yaujta protagonist – namely Dek (played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi). A runt by Yaujta standards, Dek has to go above and beyond to prove that he has a place within his species’ warrior-centric culture, and he has his opportunity to demonstrate his mettle when he gets stranded on an alien world overrun by dangers that want to kill him.
Teamed with a damaged Weyland-Yutani android named Thia (Elle Fanning), Dek is going to be featured slaughtering plenty of horrific and vicious opponents, and they will bleed. It just won’t be the color red, as Rosenblatt explained:
We're hoping that's gonna play to our advantage, which is a way of answering your question to say, 'how hard are we gonna go.' We're gonna go as hard as we possibly can within those constraints. We think we'll be able to do some pretty awesomely gruesome stuff – but colors other than red.
Why Predator: Badlands Is Aiming For A PG-13 Rating
Even with the explanation that there will be plenty of alien gore in the movie, there are still going to be questions about why this creative direction was chosen for Predator: Badlands – and as Ben Rosenblatt was speaking, it wasn’t lost on the group of journalists in the room what he was describing. The producer was specifically asked as a follow up question if Prey follow-up was going to be R-rated, and he answered directly:
It's a good question. We'll see where it ends up. Our hope for it is that it can be a PG-13 that feels like an R; that's kind of our hope. And really, what that's about is just being able to broaden out the audience for a movie like this.
Recent history has shown us that an R-rating isn’t necessarily going to have a detrimental effect on box office numbers (just look at the blockbuster box office numbers of the Deadpool movies), but it does create a barrier to entry for audiences given age restrictions for ticket sales, and that is evidently a barrier that the filmmakers behind Predator: Badlands didn’t want to deal with.
Rosenblatt told us that the reception to Prey also had a major effect on the decision. While it’s true that the 2022 Predator release got a R-rating (released initially exclusively for Hulu subscribers), the producer and writer/director Dan Trachtenberg made note of the fact that it garnered a positive response from broad audiences, and they wanted to chase that reaction with the live-action sequel:
Dan loves to make movies where it's based in a world that he's passionate about, but that he could legitimately tell his mom to go see it and she wouldn't be like, 'No way.' You know? Same for me. The hope is that we can create something that's got all the hardcore stuff that big time Predator fans would love, but then also people that wanna come to it just the way that many people came to Prey and were like, 'Oh, well I love that this feels like a Terrence Malick movie that somehow has been fused together with the Predator world.'
At the time that this article is being written/published, the MPA has not yet officially rated Predator: Badlands, so we’ll have to wait and see if the plan to get a PG-13 rating succeeds… or if all of the alien/synth blood ends up being too much. We’ll find out soon – but for now, fans can continue anticipating the franchise’s return to the big screen when the new 2025 movie arrives in theaters on November 7.
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