'Predator: Badlands'' Director Explains Why He Changed Something In The Movie After Seeing Alien- Romulus- ‘ We Gotta Use That’

Cinema Blend

In the last three years, the Alien/Predator franchise has been as active as any in modern Hollywood. Audiences have seen three new movies (Prey, Alien: Romulus, Predator: Killer Of Killers) and a new TV series (Alien: Earth), and we’ll be treated to the arrival of Predator: Badlands in theaters everywhere. Needless to say, it’s a fertile time for the canon, and while the stories are pretty disparate, it can be said that there is some cool sharing of ideas coming out of the overlapping production/release schedules.  I asked about filmmaker collaboration this past weekend when I interviewed director Dan Trachtenberg at the Los Angeles press day for Predator: Badlands – he having contributed majorly already to the franchise by helming Prey and Predator: Killer Of Killers. He started by saying that there wasn’t really any communication at all between the various projects (despite the fact that he is friendly with Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez), but that was principally because it wasn’t something that was necessary for the story that he was telling.

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00:00What is the level of communication between all of the filmmakers working on these projects

00:04and just making sure that there's no either canon overlap or creative overlap?

00:08You know, Fred and I are friends, but ironically, I wasn't really super aware of Romulus

00:15when we started making Badlands, and I was not aware at all of Alien Earth.

00:24But I instinctually sort of set Badlands as far into the future as possible just to make sure.

00:30I wasn't going to step on anyone's toes.

00:31I didn't even really quite know that Romulus was actually so set in the past and in between films.

00:38But when I saw Romulus, and I saw a little bit of an early cut,

00:46and then we all watched, when we were down in New Zealand, we all watched as a crew,

00:50and the thing with the I, having the W in the whites, what is it, rolls back?

00:57Immediately it was like, we got to use that.

00:58And there were so many places for it in our movie.

01:02So I was thrilled to be able to take that and run with it.

01:05But frankly, we're all, and then Noah reached out when he saw our trailer,

01:09and was like, wait, you got Weyland-Yutani in your thing?

01:12And he sent me where they were at with the episodes of Alien Earth at that point,

01:17and I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

01:19And assured him, don't worry, we're way beyond, we are not really doing anything similar.

01:27So yeah, we don't have much cause for specific collaboration,

01:33because we're in such different parts of the universe.

01:35But I'm certainly believing things open to be included upon

01:41and their ideas to be taken if someone should want to.

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