The Predator loses its mask in new image, Shane Black discusses the film

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Yesterday a teaser trailer was released online for THE PREDATOR, the latest entry in the sci-fi action franchise that started with 1987's PREDATOR, and along with that trailer arrived a few new images from the film. One is the image above, which features the heroic ensemble of Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Keegan Michael-Key, Thomas Jane, and Augusto Aguilera. Most of those characters are, according to Jane, war veterans suffering from PTSD.

The next image, featured below, shows a situation you can see in action in the trailer: Olivia Munn's scientist character shielding Jacob Tremblay (playing the son of Holbrook's character) while facing an offscreen Predator.

The final image is one Empire got the first look at, and it's the coolest of the bunch, showing an unmasked Predator in a lab setting, in the midst of ruining someone's day.

Directed by Shane Black from a script he wrote with Fred Dekker (the pair also wrote THE MONSTER SQUAD together back in the day), THE PREDATOR has the following synopsis: 

From the outer reaches of space to the small-town streets of suburbia, the hunt comes home in Shane Black’s explosive reinvention of the Predator series. Now, the universe’s most lethal hunters are stronger, smarter and deadlier than ever before, having genetically upgraded themselves with DNA from other species. When a young boy accidentally triggers their return to Earth, only a ragtag crew of ex-soldiers and a disgruntled science teacher can prevent the end of the human race.

Cast members not pictured here include Yvonne Strahovski, Alfie Allen, Sterling K. Brown, Edward James Olmos, and Jake Busey – who plays the son of the character his father Gary Busey played in PREDATOR 2.

The JoBlo Movie Network's own Paul Shirey visited the set of THE PREDATOR last year and got to talk with Black about his approach to the new film. To read the full interview, CLICK HERE, but here's an interesting excerpt in which Black discusses reinventing the PREDATOR franchise while honoring the films that have come before:

Well, I think that there’s a basic premise that has to be honored every time you make a Predator film and that’s in some way, whatever the plot turns out to be, it has to, at some level, represent a hunt. But, beyond that I think there’s infinite variability. It’s like, monkey bars, you ever play on the jungle gym when you were a kid? It looks like they’re rigid and hard and it’d be hard to play on these things because they’re so rough, but if you go inside them there’s actually a lot of room to move around, you just know that the borders are there every once in a while.

So, we just tried to take the existing mythology and take it a step further. Ask some questions about why? Why Predators do what they do? What would be the next step for them? How do we up the stakes so that there’s not just a single Predator hunting a group of soldiers? Who are the soldiers? How are they different? What’s the heroic quotient and how do you make it not just guys with tough talk and big arms? I mean, I always favor real characters with real actors in these movies. I’m happy to have someone like Jesse Ventura, he’s actually a fine actor as far as that goes. But, the actors we tended to get for this are a cut above I think, the average tough guy.

There’s an element of intrigue and I think espionage/mystery, whatever. The government is involved in this and it takes it to the level of what happens when The Predator strikes, these incursions are not just a every-once-in-a-while phenomenon known to a few, but have come to the attention of an establishment that is actually set on preparing for and marshaling forces against these incoming Predator strikes. And, so it’s that sort of-what the next step is when they get noticed is kind of what we start as our jumping off point for what’s different. And also, what happens when the Predators get a little more ambitious. Maybe it’s not just a weekend anymore. So, we’ve had some fun with that."

THE PREDATOR is scheduled to reach theatres on September 14th.