Even though the Predator franchise has endured for almost 35 years, with 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg currently hard at work on the latest reboot that’s set to take place in the past and focus on a tribe of Comanche warriors, it’s never posted the sort of box office numbers or gained the critical responses typically associated with properties that find themselves being relentlessly reinvented.
None of the films have been able to come anywhere close to recapturing the magic of John McTiernan’s classic original, which stands tall as a masterclass in sci-fi action cinema, while the highest-grossing outing to feature the titular extraterrestrials was Paul W.S. Anderson’s Alien vs. Predator crossover, and even then it only managed to earn $177 million globally. To put that into perspective, four of the six standalone Alien installments have easily surpassed that number.
We’ve seen four Predator movies so far, none of which managed to launch a multi-film series in their own right, but Nimrod Antal’s Predators was definitely deserving of one. The ensemble actioner drew strong reviews from critics and became an instant favorite among fans, while also turning a sizeable profit after raking in over $127 million from theaters on a $40 million budget before going on to find sustained success on home video, but the idea of a follow-up never seemed to gain much traction from the studio.
Which is a shame, because the writers were touting Die Hard mixed with James Cameron’s Aliens set on a Predator ship, which sounds all kinds of awesome, but the movie’s legacy has been reaffirmed by the fact that it’s the seventh most-watched title on Hulu right now even over a decade after it should have reinvented the franchise in a major way.