All the ‘Predator’ Movies, Ranked

Requiemdirected by Greg and Colin Strause, is set in a small Colorado town that’s under siege by an Alien-Predator hybrid, a Predalien, who was born at the end of the previous AvP film. In the Predalien’s possession are a batch of Xenomorph eggs, which of course hatch and spread chaos. A Predator named Wolf is sent to Earth to eradicate the Predalien and the Xenomorphs, while a group of largely expendable humans portrayed by Steven Pasquale, Johnny Lewis, Kristen Hager, David Paetkau, Ariel Gade, Reiko Aylesworth and John Ortiz try to escape town before being killed, either by the aliens or the nuclear strike headed for their homes.

There’s a simple narrative at play, and an attempt to bring Western genre elements to the franchise. For fans of the AvP mythos Requiem is the first film to introduce Ms. Yutani (Francoise Yip) at this point in the timeline, which is a cool moment even though it sets up a sequel that never happened. But outside of those limited features, the film that was released is presented with such limited attention to lighting that it’s nearly impossible to see any of the action beats or bloodshed in the movie. There’s something to it, but we need a fan-edit that can brighten up the film to truly see what that something is.

After being teased in 1990’s Predator 2 and spawning an entire line of comic books and video games, the Xenomorphs and the Yautjas finally came to blows on screen in Paul WS Anderson’s AVP. The film serves as a sequel to the two Predator films at the time, and a prequel to the then four Alien movies. The showdown between the two species is set in motion by a group of explorers led by Lex Woods (Sanaa Lathan) who are sent by Charles Weyland (Lance Henriksen) to explore a pyramid buried in the ice near Antarctica.

In the pyramid, the team awakens an Alien Queen which sends a trio of Predators to Earth to destroy the pyramid and Queen before her offspring can escape and overwhelm the world, which is one of their hunting grounds. There’s some goofy, inherently racist, Erich von Daniken-inspired backstory involving Predators teaching the Aztecs how to build pyramids in exchange for several humans subjecting themselves to Xenomorph embryos so that the Predators can put on hunting games. It all serves to get to what audiences came to see, which Anderson does a decent job with and works to make fit what has come before.

AVPand its aforementioned sequel, Requiemwere canon for a time, until Ridley Scott rewrote the history of the Aliens with the superior and more thought-provoking Prometheus (2012). Nevertheless, Anderson puts care into making sure the film fits within the timeline of the movies that existed upon its release. AVP mostly delivers on what it sets out to do in providing Alien versus Predator action with some great special effects and puppeteering from special effects company ADI.

Really, it’s the effects work that makes the movie, and arguably it’s a better Predator movie than the Alien movie in terms of tone and playing towards Anderson’s action strengths, of which dialogue is not one of. Sanaa Lathan’s Lex, serving in the role of Ripley-esque survivor, felt like a major win for Black audiences at the time of release, and canon or not, she remains a beloved character in the franchise. AVP is far from perfect, and it’s thematically empty, but it’s a pretty fun junk food movie.

This should’ve been a contender. When it was announced that Shane Black, script doctor, and co-star on the original Predatorwas following up Iron Man 3 (2013) and The Nice Guys (2016) with a new Predator movie, expectations could not have been higher. This was Shane Black’s world. With his penchant for sharp dialogue, great buddy dynamics, clever reinventions of genre tropes, and a cast that included Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Sterling K. Brown, Keegan-Michael Key, Jacob Tremblay, Thomas Jane and Olivia Munn, all signs pointed to the biggest and best Predator movie yet. But that isn’t what we got. What we got was a film marred by messy studio edits and controversies, including Black hiring his friend Steven Wilder Striegel, a registered sex offender, for a scene with Munn, without her being aware of Wilder’s history.

There’s an interesting set-up for the film. A group of soldiers with PTSD, led by Holbrook’s Quinn Mckenna, team-up with an evolutionary biologist, Casey Brackett (Munn) after capturing a Predator and discovering it has human DNA. Turns out, there’s a group of Yautja traveling across galaxies in order to improve themselves with other species’ DNA. With Earth seemingly doomed to fall victim to climate change in the near future, the Predators rush to Earth to find the next key to their hybridization, which is found in McKenna’s son, Rory (Tremblay). And it’s here where the movie takes a turn for the worse. Rory has autism, which is why the Predators want his DNA, and here it is treated like a magic Rosetta stone that allows for the ability to understand any language, even alien ones. When Rory is kidnapped, Quinn, his soldiers, and Brackett fight off a small army of Predators to save Rory.

There are fun moments where the Black-isms shine through and deliver on both the humor and violence audiences expected. But the movie is hacked to pieces, with entire scenes omitted, leading to new information suddenly being very important and characters dying off-screen — all for us to wonder what happened to them.

Oh, and there’s a sequel set-up with an Iron Man-esque Predator armor that was originally supposed to open to reveal Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch from the original film until he declined to appear for a cameo. The return of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from Alien and an adult Newt from Aliens were also filmed with a stuntwoman, until the film landed on an empty suit, meant for McKenna to occupy in a direct sequel that would never happen. The Predator is more frustrating than bad because there was a strong movie in there, but poor decisions by Black and the studio rendered it into something that resembles a half-eaten rotisserie chicken. There’s meat there, and yeah, it’s got some great seasoning. But someone ate half of it.

Welcome to the concrete jungle! Stephen Hopkins’ Predator 2 trades the jungles of Central America for the streets of Los Angeles. Set a decade after the events of the first film, the sequel sees Danny Glover, two Lethal Weapons in and a certified action star, play Mike Harrigan, a police detective with a fear of heights and a problem taking orders. His investigation into the brutal killings between rival Colombian and Jamaican gangs puts him on the trail of a new type of killer that appears to be supernatural. Aided by his long-time partner, Det. Archuleta (Ruben Blades) and partnered with new transfer Det. Lambert (Bill Paxton), Harrigan is made part of a DEA Task Force by Special Agent Keyes (Gary Busey) and led on an increasingly bloody chase through the streets of LA to find that what he’s dealing with isn’t supernatural but extraterrestrial. Keyes reveals that he isn’t DEA, but an agent dispatched to capture the Predator, which naturally is easier said than done.

Predator 2 is a film that is both blessed and cursed with excess. The whole endeavor, not just the gang war, feels fueled by drugs. Everyone is immensely, at times comically, sweaty. The dialogue is often profane without reason, and the Columbians and Jamaicans are written and portrayed with such extreme, ethnic stereotypes, that not even “it was the ’90s” works as an excuse. And then there’s Busey, who is on an entirely different level with his insights into the film, as seen on the special features of the physical media releases. His portrayal is made even more fascinating to watch with the knowledge that Keyes was originally written to be the original franchise hero, Dutch, but Schwarzenegger declined to return, opting to do Kindergarten Cop and Total Recall instead, both of which only enhanced his superstardom.

When Predator 2 hits a lull, it’s a real comedown that is almost impossible to stay awake through. But when it hits, especially in the third act where Harrigan confronts the Predator on his ship, meets the Yautja elders, and the film introduces the lore for Alien vs Predator, along with the realization that the Predators have been coming to Earth for centuries all come into focus, it’s some of the best Predator stuff ever put on screen. There’s a lot of sweat and blood to get there, but when we do, it’s out of this world.

It took a long time, too long, before we got a third Predator movie, not counting the AVP entries. And by the time we did, interest in the property had cooled down. But of all the Predator movies worthy of a revisit, the Robert Rodriguez-penned, Nimrod Antal directed Predators may be the biggest surprise. Adrian Brody, a seemingly unlikely action hero unless you’ve looked him in the eyes and heard him tell you about his youth, leads an ensemble cast as Royce, a veteran turned mercenary.

Royce, along with a less than merry band of hardened killers and sociopaths, portrayed by Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Walton Goggins, Mahershala Ali, Danny Trejo, Louis Ozawa Changchien and Oleg Taktarov find themselves captive on a game preserve planet and forced to play the most dangerous game with four Yautja, boasting an assortment of weapons, traps, and Hell Hounds (Predator dogs, for lack of a more specific term). As the group are picked off one by one, Royce and the remaining survivors formulate a plan after meeting Noland (Laurence Fishburne), an Army Air Calvary soldier who has managed to survive multiple hunting cycles on the planet but has gone a bit the way of Apocalypse Now‘s Colonel Kurtz as a result. Of course, there are no good plans when dealing with Predators which leads to a raucous third act full of double-crosses, bloodshed, and yes, a nod to the original movie.

Initial reactions to Predators were lukewarm, but the film found its audience over time, and appreciation has been granted to the action choreography, practical effect cts, and performances. Yes, there’s some narrative shallowness and a lack of emotional depth from its broadly drawn supporting character archetypes, but Predators does a lot of world-building with a $40 million budget and is notable for being the first Predator movie set outside of Earth, a torch Badlands picks up. Brody has expressed enthusiasm about the idea of ​​returning to the franchise, which would be welcomed by fans, and made entirely plausible given the next entry on this list.

2025 granted us not one, but two Predator films this year. Director and current Yautja whisperer Dan Trachtenberg delivered the first (and hopefully not last) animated Predator film with Predator: Killer of Killers. The film takes an anthology approach by introducing three different warriors’ encounters with a Yuatja across three different time periods.

The first segment, “The Shield” is set in Scandinavia in 841 and sees the Viking Warrior Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy) trying to teach her young son the importance of honor through revenge when she and her tribe are ambushed by a massive Yautja and the depth of Ursa’s loss and thirst for vengeance only grows.

The second segment, “The Sword” is set in Japan in 1609, is focused on Kenji and Kiyoshi (Louis Ozawa), two sons of a samurai warrior who were pitted against each other as children, and twenty years later are forced to confront the sins of the past, while the sins of another world are visited upon them and both are challenged to the deadliest duel they’ve faced.

The third segment, “The Bullet” is set in 1942 and centers on a young mechanic, John J. Torres (Rick Gonzalez) who is drafted into WWII as a fighter pilot who gets more than he bargained for when faced with a Yautja fighter pilot whose technology far exceeds that of the US Navy. Torres is forced to outsmart alien tech and even that doesn’t guarantee his safety. All three characters come together in the final segment, “The Battle” which sees Ursa, Kenji, and Torres thawed from cryosleep and forced into a gladiator battle against a giant alien species, overseen by the Yautja Chieftain, “The Grendel King.”

Killer of Killers makes dazzling use of animation, using the medium not as a means to cut costs on a film that could’ve been live action, but because animation was the only suitable format through which these stories could be told. The film is of such quality that it could easily have been a worthy theatrical release. From voice acting, the detail to period costumes and architecture, sound effects and score, Killer of Killers isn’t a spin-off or a soft launch for an animated series, but a feature film that is as essential to the franchise as any of the live-action entries. Plus, the film contains some fun Easter eggs, like introducing Torres’ Commanding Officer Vandy, who is voiced by Michael Biehn.

This makes Biehn and his friend, the late and beloved actor, Bill Paxton, the only actors to have fought a Terminator, Alien, and Predator. Additionally, the film’s ending raises the stakes for the future of the franchise with the cryo-pods containing the sleeping bodies of Naru from PreyHarrigan from Predator 2and the big man himself, Dutch, from the movie that started it all. With Trachtenberg having already conceived of big plans for the Predator franchise, and discussed these roles with their respective actors, it’s only a matter of time before we see where all of this is leading.

“If it bleeds, we can kill it.” John McTiernan’s film has become such a pop-cultural touchstone, so often quoted, homaged, and referenced that it’s almost too easy to take for granted what a masterful and thrilling film it is, away from all the noise. It is almost just as easy to forget that Predator was almost a very different film entirely.

When screenwriters Jim and John Thomas originally conceived of Predatorit was called Hunter and involved a group of extraterrestrial hunters of different species hunting down a variety of alien targets. The Thomas brothers’ concept was streamlined, but still far from its final form. Jean-Claude Van Damme was originally cast as the Predator, which at that point was going to be an alien martial artist and looked like some cross between a canine and an ant, and had big yellow eyes. Van Damme hated wearing the suit, both because of heat exhaustion and because it covered up his face. Van Damme was let go and replaced with Kevin Peter Hall, who wore a vastly different, and more threatening, suit designed by practical effects maestro Rick Baker. And thus, an iconic movie monster was born.

Changing the script from a group of aliens hunting other aliens to a single alien hunting a group of men changes the stakes. In one of his most beloved roles, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Dutch, the leader of a rescue team on a mission to save hostages in the jungle of Central America. Along for the ride are Dillion (Carl Weathers), Cooper (Jesse Ventura), Mac (Bill Duke), Ramirez (Richard Chaves), Billy (Sonny Landham), and Hawkins (Shane Black).

With Weathers already an action star in his own right, and the rest of the cast, minus, Black, having worked with Schwarzenegger on Commando (1985) and The Running Man (1987) this lineup was the equivalent of watching The Expendables before it became a gimmick. The familiarity of the cast comes through onscreen and there’s an immediate sense that all of these characters have a history. It also makes their deaths and the reactions from their teammates more effective.

Long before we get a good look at the Predator, he’s already been built up as a major threat in the minds of the audience, because something that can take out a team of testosterone fueled soldiers is no joke. McTiernan builds mystique around the monster through its use of cloaking and face mask, and it’s something that couldn’t quite be replicated ever again.

The moment when the Predator’s mask is removed and we’re given our first full look at the Yautja remains thrilling all of these decades later, because even through we all know what it looks like at this point, it’s still hard to wrap your head around what you’re seeing, in part because of Dutch’s shocked reaction, and because Baker’s effects and Hall’s performance are so convincing that for a brief moment, you can suspend disbelief long enough to believe you’re looking at an actual biological creature that was found for the movie. And really, biology is what the film comes down to. Dutch stripped of his teammates, his weapons, and forced to camouflage himself in mud, taps into something primal that showcases human resolve against alien might and makes an underdog out of Mr. Universe.

And speaking of underdogs, the latest Predator installment achieves the previously unthinkable and makes the Predator a protagonist the audience roots for. Dan Trachtenberg’s third go round with the Predator franchise proves he has no desire to repeat himself visually, tonally, or narratively. Predator: Badlands is as bold a step away from what’s come before as Prey and Killers of Killers are. Written by Patrick Aison and Trachtenberg, Badlands follows, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) a Yautja runt whose father gives him one last attempt to prove himself worthy of the clan or be killed to cull out weakness.

Burdened by a recent tragedy, Dek sets his sights on an impossible task, killing a behemoth known as the Kalisk on Genna, also known as the Death Planet. With his equipment damaged in a crash, and vicious wildlife at every turn, Dek reluctantly forms a partnership with Thia (Elle Fanning), a Weyland-Yutani synth missing the lower half of her body.

Badlands never slows down. It’s one rip, roaring set piece to the next, yet all the while there’s character growth, and bonds formed in these moments. There’s also a deconstruction of the “army of one” machismo that helped define the first entry. Many characteristics, both physical and psychological thought to be weaknesses, ultimately prove to be strengths. It’s no surprise that Trachtenberg has previously cited George Miller as an influence, because in terms of integrating essential character work within the action sequences, there is a fragment of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) within the film’s arsenal. That’s not all Trachtenberg has in his tool belt as he creates a landscape that feels like a collage of images conjured by pulp sci-fi comics, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Frazetta.

But Badlands isn’t merely interested in creating allusions to others’ works, Trachtenberg and Aison expand the lore of the Yautja, canonizing their species name, examining their culture and code, crafting a language, and of course connecting the Predator franchise to the Alien franchise in a way that feels natural and doesn’t promise any immediate meeting or conflict between the two species. Impressively, the filmmakers craft rich characters in a film that has no humans to serve as points of comparison. As the first Predator film without human characters, Badlands is proof of concept of just how far Trachtenberg can take this franchise by centering it on the Yautja and its journey, rather than always finding the protagonist in their prey.

Dan Trachtenberg changed the game with his first foray into the Predator franchise. Rather than testing the Yautja against increasingly modern warfare, Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison delivered a prequel to the franchise that proved to be both the shot in the arm the franchise needed, as well as culturally and historically relevant. Prey, despite being released as a Hulu original rather than a theatrical feature, made the Predator franchise feels fresh and exciting again.

The film, set in the Northern Great Plains in 1719, follows Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman who dreams of being a hunter like her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), instead of a healer as her tribe ordains for women. Rebelling against tradition and her elders, Naru goes hunting and sees something streak across the sky. Believing it to be a thunderbird, and a sign that she’s ready to become a hunter, she follows its path. What she discovers is a Yautja, which she dubs Mupitsi, who not only challenges her future as a hunter but the future of her entire tribe.

It is such a rarity for a Hollywood genre film, especially one that is part of a major franchise to take the time and care to embed not only an audience, but the cast and crew within a culture, and to do it authentically. Producer Jhane Myers, a member of the Comanche Nation and the Blackfeet Nation, was integral to the film’s success, and she provided relevant materials, details for props, and a significant contribution to the film’s script by being adamant that horses were included in the film, citing the historical horse culture of the Comanches. While the film was shot in English, the film was later dubbed in Comanche by the entire cast, making Prey the first film to have a Comanche language dub.

Midthunder successfully creates a new type of action hero for the franchise. Naru is equal parts warrior and healer, and it is both her skills in plant recognition and herbal remedies, as well as her prowess with a throwing ax that immediately made her a fan-favorite of the franchise that had launched with brawny men. And the Predator himself, Mupitsi (Dane DiLiegro), or the Feral Predator as he’s referred to in marketing, makes the Yautja both mysterious and frightening again, showcasing a new kind of skillset with “primitive” Yautja weaponry, and physical features that distinguish him from the Yautja that have come before. DiLiegro, exhibits freer movement in the suit than any of the previous Predator actors have before, making for some truly stellar fight choreography.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, Trachtenberg and Aison remember the past by including the origin of the flintlock pistol from Predator 2making Taabe a previous incarnation of Predator‘s American Indian character, Billy Sole, which adds context and heightens emotions surrounding his last stand in that initial film. But they also pave the way for the future by establishing just how different Predator’s can vary in terms of their physical traits and culture, which is followed up in Predator: Badlands. And the stage is set for Naru’s return, which would make her one of the only human characters in the franchise to lead more than one movie. The hunt continues.