Of all the franchises that Disney has hungrily gobbled up over the last decade, who would have thought that the most consistently excellent series would be Predator?

Yet, under the creative stewardship of Dan Trachtenberg, not only has the Predator franchise reached (if not quite surpassed) the peak set by the original 1987 movie, but it’s done so by taking some pretty massive swings in terms of its content.

In Predator: Badlands (the franchise’s second movie in 2025, following the animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers), we’re introduced to Dek, a Yautja (that’s the name of the alien species otherwise known as Predators) who’s the runt of his clan. Violently rejected by his peers, he sets out to prove himself, aiming his sights on seemingly impossible prey. He’s soon mandible-deep in a plot by the nefarious Weyland-Yutani corporation, making unlikely allies and new enemies along the way.

The connection with the Alien franchise, seeing as Weyland-Yutani is so heavily featured here, is admirably restrained, and instead does a great job of simply widening the Predator universe in its current form. If you’re familiar with Alien lore, you’ll enjoy the way that the corporation is used here, but equally it doesn’t require that familiarity.

Though many fans had complained about the way Dek looked in the trailers, I had absolutely no issue with his visual design in the movie itself. He has perhaps been ever so slightly humanised in comparison to other Yautja we’ve seen, but as he’s the story’s protagonist and we’re with him, mostly maskless, all the way, it was perhaps a deliberate decision to help make him a little more emotive and relatable.

Speaking of which, Dek really is a great main character. You find yourself rooting for him immediately, with a blistering open action sequence that sets the scene superbly.

Despite the odd moment of uneven CGI (the aforementioned open scene has a couple of moments where the fighters are obviously CG, as one example), for the most part the effects are superb. The design of the flora and fauna is hugely inventive and just about everything is used in hugely satisfying ways.

I was really impressed with the score by Benjamin Wallfisch and Sarah Schachner, which prominently features tribal drums alongside more synthesized sounds and melodies. There’s some moments of real beauty, fleeting moments of calm amidst the sound and fury of the involving, badass, thrilling action; thanks to the gorgeous visuals and superb choreography, as well as Wallfisch and Schachner’s music.

There’s a surprising number of funny moments too, thanks in part to Elle Fanning’s talkative Weyland-Yutani android (or synthetic), but also with another addition to the cast I won’t reveal here. A sequence involving legs is both brilliantly inventive and hilarious too.

Overall, I was hugely impressed with Predator: Badlands. It takes perhaps the biggest diversion from the norm of the series yet, with the Yautja protagonist, and yet does so in a way that seems so effortless, making Dek’s journey and evolution so compelling that you wonder why it was never done before. It’s another triumph from director Dan Trachtenberg, who’s now made three wildly different, equally brilliant Predator movies, each of which outclass almost everything the franchise has previously given us.

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