The beauty of Predator: Badlands is it’s as connected, or disconnected, to the larger Predator universe as you want it to be. On the one hand, it’s purposely set hundreds or even thousands of years beyond any other story in the franchise, making sure it’s not beholden to the events of any other film. And yet, it’s also filled with lore connecting it in a larger context to Yautja culture as well as the Alien and Predator franchises. Eagle-eyed viewers may have even seen a very, very quick cameo by Naru, the star of Prey, and, apparently, her appearance was a relic from a version with a few larger connections.
Naru appears briefly early in the film when Dek is aboard his brother Kwei’s ship. Kwei explains that, to become a full-fledged member of the clan, Dek will have to choose a dangerous prey and go out into the universe and hunt it. As they speak, Dek scrolls through several holograms of options, and almost exactly after Kwei says the word “Prey,” Dek scrolls by a hologram showing the outline of Naru, the Comanche woman who killed a Yautja way back in 1719, and whom Predator: Killer of Killers reveals was later frozen by the Yautja.
Where is Naru now? Is she still alive and out there to be hunted? We don’t know. But, speaking to Screenrant, Badlands director Dan Trachtenberg revealed other characters from the Predator and Alien franchises appeared in that scene very early in the process when they put in temporary VFX. “You passed a xenomorph [from Alien], you pass by Dutch [from Predator] and Naru,” Trachtenberg said. “Also, the creature after it was the Back Biter creature from [the end of] Killer of Killers… We really wanted to nod to our favorite characters that the Predators have fought against.”
However, as the process went along, the scene got “truncated,” so those characters all but disappeared. “[Dek and Kwei] had a longer conversation, or they said the same idea of ‘Pick Your Planet,’ and all that stuff, but it was a little bit longer,” he said. “So there were more holograms to be in the background. And what we have now is more soft focus in the foreground.”
We feel like, while it’s fun that they tried to get those characters in there, ultimately, the right decision was made for them not to be. Anything that takes an audience’s attention away from this story and these characters has the potential to hurt it. But maybe you disagree. Let us know below.
Predator: Badlands is now available on 4K, Blu-ray, DVD, and streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
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