New Predator movie has an unexpected and sneaky Stranger Things crossover

The new movie, Predator: Badlands, comes out this week. It seems like a self-contained story, but it actually has connections to the larger Alien universe. Interestingly, a very subtle link to Stranger Things has also been discovered in the film.

The movie centers on a young Predator who’s considered an underdog by his people. He joins forces with a synthetic human created by the Weyland-Yutani corporation for a risky and challenging hunt.

This is Dan Trachenberg’s second live-action Predator movie, following his work on the animated film Predator: Killer of Killers released earlier this year.

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In an interview with ScreenTime/Dexerto, Trachenberg said that working on the film prevented him from directing an episode of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, a project he had previously been set to work on.

Even so, he remains close friends with the Duffer brothers and trusts them enough to include them in his project, Badlands.

I was originally scheduled to direct the third episode of Stranger Things and had begun working on it, but then this film was approved, so I had to shift my focus.

I was considering working on Killer of Killers and then traveling to New Zealand for another project. Unfortunately, both opportunities arose at the same time, and I couldn’t manage both, so I had to decline one of them.

I had the idea of asking them to make a quick appearance in the movie, and they were really enthusiastic, though a little worried about not being actors. I reassured them that we’d use sound effects to make it seem like their voices were coming from a computer.

“And they literally got the Duffers to speak in Yautja [the Predator language]. It was so fun.”

Surprisingly, Predator: Badlands received a 12A rating, making it the least restrictive installment in the Predator series. In the US, it’s rated PG-13, the same as Alien vs Predator.

Even though some first reactions to the film have described it as violent and very bloody, we wanted to understand why. So, Digital Spy reached out to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) for answers.

Predator: Badlands is released in cinemas on 7 November.

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2025-11-03 17:49