Predator: Badlands is set in the future on a remote planet, where a young Predator named Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), outcast from his clan, finds an unlikely ally in Thia (Elle Fanning) and embarks on a treacherous journey in search of the ultimate adversary. “In general, I’m always looking for: what could happen only in this movie?” director Dan Trachtenberg said, adding that the movie is “kind of a buddy-comedy” with Dek and Thia. “Prey was a solo survival tale; this is a relationship story.“
And while the franchise is exploring a concept never truly seen before, the purely sci-fi angle might actually provide more leeway with the MPA ratings board, according to Producer Ben Rosenblatt. He told IGN that, despite Predator: Badlands sporting the same intensity of violence as previous franchise entries, the fact that they’re all aliens or robots might actually give the film a more audience-friendly PG-13. “We don’t have any humans in the movie and so we don’t have any human red blood,” Rosenblatt stated. “So we’re hoping that’s gonna play to our advantage. 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 in colors other than red.”
Rosenblatt also said, “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 first entry in the franchise that received a PG-13 rating was 2004’s Alien vs Predator, which had humans, but the violence was toned down to appeal to a larger audience.
The process or intent of the ratings board isn’t quite so clear-cut, as shown in the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated. For instance, in 1992’s Army of Darkness, Sam Raimi shot the film with the intention of a PG-13 rating, as the film features no real gore compared to the graphic violence of the previous Evil Dead movies, but a comically large geyser of unrealistic-looking blood would seal its R-rated fate no matter what. Additionally, during an interview that can be seen on the new Arrow 4K release of Spawn, Todd McFarlane says that the movie barely has a drop of human blood, but because the subject matter dealt with the Devil and Hell and demons, the MPA slapped an R on it unless they made even more cuts.
