Can Predator: Badlands finally prove a shared universe with Alien was a good idea?

The buzz in the blogosphere after this early glimpse at the film is that Elle Fanning’s Thia is a Weyland-Yutani “synthetic” – otherwise known as an android. This, of course, would be no shakes whatsoever if Badlands were an Alien movie, but is far more of a smack-bang-wallop geek moment because we are ostensibly watching a Predator film, albeit one that clearly takes place in a shared universe with Alien: Romulus, and every brooding, acid-spitting, pipe-clanging nightmare that went before it. For all we know, Thia’s been manufactured by the Engineers, nurtured by David, and signed off by a mid-level corporate replicant with a clipboard and a God complex. The world’s eyes just flipped silver, the milk-blood is flowing, and it’s party time in the cryo-sarcophagus aisle of Space Ikea.

Is Badlands the Suicide Squad of dark sci-fi flicks, with the long-running sci-fi bad guys now reimagined as the heroes of the piece? Quite possibly – if Suicide Squad had starred a mournful Predator and an android who looks like she dreams in piano chords and existential dread. We’ve seen decent synthetics before in the Alien movies – the kind of quietly noble humanoid machines that make you ashamed you ever doubted their essential humanity. But they’ve never really been the central protagonists (the closest we got is Romulus’s traumatised teen colonist Andy). And we’ve certainly never seen a Predator movie focused on what appears to be an emo teenage member of the warrior clan who may or may not have been thrown out of his tribe for listening to too much My Chemical Romance and refusing to polish his skulls.

Whatever you say about Badlands, it promises to avoid the chest-thumping fan-service of the AvP films. There are unlikely to be low-budget WWE-style wrestling antics in church basements and Predalien hybrids. It seems unlikely that, this time around, we’ll be gifted pyramid floor plans designed by a committee of video game bosses. Instead it looks like we’re going to get a sad, pensive android with abandonment issues, a sensitive but still quite angry Predator and a world on fire. All that’s missing is a Xenomorph in therapy, perhaps trying to process its relationship with Ripley.

The film is directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who has somehow managed to become the Predator whisperer for an entire generation of sci-fi horror nerds. After Prey (2022) – that elegant, slow-burning period piece about a Comanche warrior facing off against a proto-Predator in the 1700s – Trachtenberg proved that you can take this franchise in any direction. So why not swap out mud and muskets for volcanic badlands and a side-order of post-human malaise?

The design work here is more than promising. The trailer shows off some very deliberate aesthetic overlap with Alien – including a Weyland-Yutani branded rover, Fanning’s stark, David-adjacent appearance, and a fair bit of tech that looks suspiciously like it’s one firmware update away from birthing a facehugger. It’s all just canonical enough to make fans overanalyse every moment like this is the Rosetta Stone of space horror.

The crossover potential here isn’t new, of course. The Alien and Predator franchises have been dancing in the dark since 1990, when a Xenomorph skull first appeared on a Predator’s trophy wall in Predator 2, launching a thousand fan theories and, eventually, a couple of studio-mandated mashups that nobody really asked for but everyone secretly watched anyway. The difference this time is tone. Badlands isn’t going for spectacle. It’s going for sadness. Existentialism. Vibes. And possibly a decent portion of the kind of teenage alien angst we all experience when it suddenly becomes apparent our honour-bound spacefaring culture doesn’t recognise modding cloaking devices to play Death Cab for Cutie guitar solos as a valid rite of passage.

In the age of cinematic universes, this kind of narrative cross-pollination feels less like a surprise and more like an inevitability. Through its purchase of 20th Century Fox, Disney now owns the rights to Alien, Predator, Avatar, The Simpsons and about 70% of your childhood nightmares. All that’s missing is a single film where Bart Simpson lights a Xenomorph’s fart on fire using a Predator’s plasmacaster, before declaring himself the new king of Pandora.

We’re not there yet. But Badlands makes it all feel weirdly plausible.