Everything we know so far about Predator: Badlands

By Joe Allen Updated September 17, 2025

Like any long-running franchise, Predator and its various sequels have given audiences a bumpy ride. The franchise has been riding a hot hand lately. Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers were both successful on Hulu, and now, the franchise is returning to the big screen with Predator: Badlands.

The same creative team from Prey is reuniting here, so it’s fair to be excited about what this new installment could bring. So far, the marketing team has been careful to withhold some key information about the movie. Given that there’s definitely some caginess around this, here’s everything we know about Predator: Badlands.

Predator: Badlands is set to hit theaters on November 7, 2025. We don’t know when it will be available to stream. When it does, it will likely wind up on Disney+ and Hulu.

Most Predator movies put the humans being hunted by the Predator at the center of the story. Badlands is taking the opposite approach. This installment follows a Yautja “runt” named Dek as he navigates life on his home world. The movie also stars Elle Fanning as Thia, a synthetic.

Badlands is also the biggest indication yet that Disney is fine with the worlds of Predator and Alien combining, and Fanning’s Thia is quite evidently a Weyland-Yutani synth from the Alien universe. What implications this might have for the future of these franchises is unclear. It’s not the first time that these universes have collided, i.e., Alien vs. Predator.

We don’t know all the details about the movie’s plot. However, it’s clear that Dek is on the outs with his clan after failing them in some way, and then goes on the hunt for an ultimate predator to prove his worth. It’s on another remote planet that he runs into Thia. It also seems like humans and a non-predator tracker of some kind are hunting him, although we don’t know why.

Elle Fanning is the biggest name in the movie’s cast, and we also know that Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi will be playing the central role of Dek. The rest of the cast is largely a mystery, but similar to Prey, this movie will feature unknown actors.

It seems that 20th Century Studios is betting that people will show up because this is a Predator movie, and don’t think they need any enormous stars to sell the movie. Fanning is certainly the biggest name in the cast by a decent stretch, and even she is not a proven, bankable star at this point. It’s been a while since there was a Predator movie in theaters, though, so that alone might be enough to leave some intrigued.

Like Prey, Predator: Badlands was written and directed by Dan Trachtenberg, with Patrick Aison also contributing to the script. Since his work on Prey, Trachtenberg has become the Kevin Feige of the Predator universe and also had a hand in Predator: Killer of Killers, which was released straight to Hulu earlier this year. In discussing Badlands with Comicbook.com, Trachtenberg suggested that he was excited to explore the Predator’s homeworld, and to build out a language for them.

“That’s one of the cool things of the movie, is that, outside of very brief glimpses in other films, we’re on Yautja Prime, what is known as Yautja Prime mainly from extended universe stuff,” he explained. “There’s a lot in this movie that is more from the extended universe than is from things that are properly in the movie. I should mention the language.

“We, insanely, decided to really treat that properly and worked with, we reached out to the guy who does the Na’vi language [in Avatar], who was very occupied, and recommended his mentee. We did it the way that, for The Lord of the Rings, you would do Elvish, for Game of Thrones, you do Dothraki. Except for those, there’s more precedent, for us, there’s very little.”

20th Century Studios has premiered two trailers for Predator: Badlands. The first is more of a teaser and is just a little more than one minute long. While it doesn’t offer much in the way of plot details, it does suggest that the movie will be sweeping and big, and it certainly seems like Badlands has a bigger budget than Prey did.

The second trailer, meanwhile, offers a little more detail on what Dek and Thia might be facing over the course of the movie and also offers firm confirmation that she’s a Weyland-Yutani model. Based on the two trailers, this movie is going to be a two-hander.

We also know that Elle Fanning’s synth just has the upper half of her body, and it seems like she might spend the majority of her time in the film attached to Dek. We also get brief glimpses at another larger predator and some humans, although again, we’re not getting much of a sense of how all these pieces fit together.

Predator Badlands seems pretty intent on hiding its premise from the audience as much as it can, and it’s clearly hoping that people will be intrigued enough to show up anyway.

We also don’t know exactly where Badlands fits in the broader Predator timeline, but unlike most franchises, Predator has never been all that concerned with overarching world-building. Recently, the Predator franchise realized that the easiest way to keep churning out interesting movies is to change the Predator’s opponent in every new installment.

Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers both took that approach and were more interesting as a result. Crucially, though, both of those movies are basically stand-alone projects, whereas this one seems to be a bit more interconnected with the rest of the franchise and also more interested in broader world-building.

Badlands is going to give us a much better sense of what the homeworld of the Predators is like and what it might feel like to be cast out of their society. And, given that there’s a synthetic in it, it seems fair to say that it probably takes place in the future.