![]() Hearing the complaints from fans following the first film, Requiem amped up the blood and gore to get the R rating that people expected. ![]() Predator: Requiem was released three years later in 2007 directed by Colin and Greg Strause. Anyway, it was critically reviled and deemed a major disappointment by fans in no small part for the decision to remove any gratuitous violence in order to get a PG-13 rating. Directed by the great Paul Thomas Anderson, it achieved both critical and financial success and is still lauded as a high point in American cinema today. Studio executives at 20th Century Fox eventually saw the cash cow they had on their hands and green lit an film adaptation crossing over the two franchises in the early ‘00s. You best believe I owned this two-pack action figure set as a kid. ![]() How did we get to this point where Marvel has the comic book license and Hulu (owned by Disney) has exclusive streaming rights? Well let’s take a look at the successes and failures in the franchise over the years that got us to this point. Two new additions to the franchise are debuting in the span of less than a week: Prey, a prequel film directed by Dan Trachtenberg and starring Amber Midthunder, and Predator, a new ongoing comic series published by Marvel from writer Ed Brisson and artist Kev Walker. For those unfamiliar with that first film, it tells the story of a group of cartoonishly unstoppable ‘80s action heroes (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, and others) who find themselves being stalked and killed one by one by a technologically advanced extraterrestrial big game hunter on a hunting expedition on Earth. That success would spawn multiple sequels and spin-off films, comic book adaptations, video games, novels, and action figures that helped the franchise permeate pop culture to a level rarely seen by an R-rated genre film. It was wildly successful making almost $100 million dollars at the box office on an $18 million dollar budget. It has everything you could want from an ‘80s genre film: great story, huge stars, fantastic one-liners, inventive kills, thrilling action sequences, shocking twists, and one of the best creature designs in cinema history. Sure, the next one might idea might be good, and maybe even the one after that, but eventually, as is the case with superhero movies for a lot of people right now, the novelty will wear off.Predator (1987) directed by John McTiernan might be the greatest action/thriller/horror hybrid film of all time. There's a very real risk that the next few years are filled with those studios dropping their IP into various time periods in an attempt to replicate Prey's success. Those voices convinced Sony to re-release Morbius in cinemas after all. Whenever anything enjoys a modicum of success, people have a tendency to do it to death, especially when that success is backed by the loudest voices on social media. The positive reaction to Prey runs the risk of exactly that happening in the coming years. A bandwagon that every studio in Hollywood hops aboard. I briefly jumped on this bandwagon, but then I quickly hopped off again, because that's exactly what I don't want Prey to become. I'm assuming he would have married and then beheaded one of them. Half joke, half serious suggestions like Final Destination on a pirate ship, or how Henry VIII would have handled a zombie invasion. I've seen a number of posts and tweets questioning why this isn't done more often. Admittedly a low bar for Prey to hop over, but when I saw Jesse Ventura heaping praise on it and its lead Amber Midthunder, I gave it a chance. It was labeled the best Predator movie since the original. I had very little intention of watching Prey until glowing praise for it filled my timeline. If you have seen even one of the Predator movies that has come since, you'll understand why it didn't. It has made various acquisitions, something that appears to be all the rage these days, and off the back of those acquisitions, it has been the platform on which we watch very non-Disney movies like Prey.Īs someone who watched Predator for the first time at far too young an age to be watching that sort of thing, and loved it instantly, you would think news of a new movie in the series would excite me. However, Disney knew going in that even a back catalog stretching back almost a century isn't enough all by itself. You know, back when it was only 20 movies you needed to watch back-to-back and not an intricate web of blockbusters, TV shows, and shorts about Baby Groot. When Disney+ launched in 2019, most of us probably thought we would use it for little more than watching Pixar movies and the MCU over and over.
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