There’s barely been a single franchise in history that’s scored unanimous acclaim, but few have proven to be more consistently inconsistent than Predator.
While that’s to be expected given that the property has encompassed sequels, prequels, and crossovers since its inception 35 years ago, what makes the sprawling intergalactic saga a more curious case than most is the long-running debate over which successor comes closest to matching the brilliance of John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s classic original.
Recent Hulu offering Prey may have landed the best reviews of the entire saga, but in terms of direct continuations of the original mythology, opinion tends to be a split. Predator 2 was hardly showered in universal praise, but it holds a special place in the heart of the fandom. Alien vs Predator and dismal sequel Requiem are viewed as the bottom of the pile, with Shane Black’s The Predator lurking somewhere in the middle.
Based on the fact a recent Reddit post has racked up close to 600 comments at the time of writing, the vast majority of which are in firm agreement with the OP, it looks as though we can finally surmise that Nimrod Antal’s Predators can be definitively deemed as “the best of the rest”.
As popular as Prey proved to be, it still stings for a lot of people that Predators never got a second installment of its own, which was a surprise when it netted solid reviews from both critics and fans, while a $127 million box office haul on a $40 million budget (plus an additional $32 million in home video sales in the United States alone) ensured that it turned a hefty profit.
Existing somewhere between sequel, reboot, and all-out tribute to the OG, Predators didn’t deserve to go down in the history books as a one-and-done effort.