Outside of the Alien vs. Predator mashup movie, the core Predator franchise has always been a rated “R” affair, and director Dan Trachtenberg’s two contributions thus far – Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers – have carried that very rating. But it seems Trachtenberg’s next Predator project, Predator: Badlands, will be an exception to that […]
Outside of the Alien vs. Predator mashup movie, the core Predator franchise has always been a rated “R” affair, and director Dan Trachtenberg’s two contributions thus far – Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers – have carried that very rating. But it seems Trachtenberg’s next Predator project, Predator: Badlands, will be an exception to that unwritten franchise rule.
Predator: Badlands looks to be a PG-13 affair, and that largely seems to be because, well, that’s the movie Trachtenberg always set out to make. The key here? There are no humans in the movie, which means the violence is all creature-on-creature or android-related.
As producer Ben Rosenblatt explained to Bloody Disgusting during our visit to the Predator: Badlands set, “We don’t have any humans in the movie, and so we don’t have any human red blood. We’re hoping that’s going to play to our advantage. Which is a way of answering your question, how hard are we going to go?
“We’re going to go as hard as we possibly can within those constraints, and we think we’ll be able to do some pretty awesomely gruesome stuff, but colors other than red.“
Rosenblatt echoed these same sentiments in a chat with IGN during their own set visit. He explained to the outlet, “We’ll see where it ends up, but our hope for it is that it can be a PG-13 that feels like an R. That’s kind of our hope. And really, what that’s about is just being able to broaden out the audience for a movie like this.”
The MPA is indeed historically more accepting of the violent dispatching of non-humans, with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn being a particularly notable example of the horror hack of using non-red blood. The monsters in the film bleed green, which allowed for Dusk Till Dawn to push the boundaries of bloodshed without being slapped with an NC-17 rating. That film was of course very much a rated “R” affair regardless, but it’s a good example of being able to work around the MPA’s lack of appetite for gruesome material.
