Now that The Nice Guys is out, director Shane Black has started talking about his next big project, a new Predator movie. So far everything about the project sounds amazing, with Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Iron Man 3) teaming with Fred Dekker (The Monster Squad, Night of the Creeps, House) to finally make an entry in The Predator series worthy of the original action masterpiece. Now, in new interviews with Empire and IGN, Shane Black lays out some of the specific ways he plans to rejuvenate the series with The Predator.
Here’s what Black told IGN about the tone he’s shooting for in The Predator:
“We're going to get a great cast and we really just write it and write and and write it - just keep writing it to make it as interesting and stuffed with ideas as we can and hopefully to re-infuse it with a sense of mystery. The worst thing you could hope for in one of these is a shot in bright sunlight of a field and the Predator just kind of walks on and 'hello' - you want to do... I keep going back to Ridley Scott, the way he captured the alien in that first movie. The sense of mystery and portent. If we could just cut into a little piece of that - that sort of vibe - and then I think there's humour to be had too. And tonal shifting. I'm just having a ball. I'm getting more excited by the day, 30 years later working on this damn thing.”
When it comes to inspiration you could do a whole lot worse than Alien … like Prometheus.
But even more exciting than the evident thought and care being put into the new Predator is the possibility that it might be the most muscled action movie of all time, combining Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
As it stands, Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to make at least a cameo appearance in The Predator. Since Black told Empire the name of the main character in The Predator is Quinn Mackenna, we know the movie won’t be led by Schwarzenegger’s Dutch Schaefer character, who killed the original Predator.
But when asked about casting The Rock in The Predator (Black is already working with The Rock on Doc Savage ), the director left open the possibility that the action giant could appear, saying, “I’m meeting with him in a couple of weeks. Who knows?... anything can happen in this crazy genre world.”
We were already super excited for The Predator, but now it’s a little frightening. Can celluloid contain that much bicep?
