Elle Fanning and Dan Trachtenberg take fans behind the scenes of explosive action-adventure Predator: Badlands

Following the success of Prey (2022), director Dan Trachtenberg returns to the Predator franchise with a bold new entry: Predator: Badlands. Scheduled for release on November 7, 2025, the film is the sixth live-action installment in the long-running sci-fi series - and the first to fully bridge elements from both the Predator and Alien universes.

Building on the stripped-back, survivalist tone of Prey, Trachtenberg aims to expand the mythology in an unexpected direction.

Dan said,“Following the movie Prey, I was thinking about what I would do next. I wanted to make, truly, an adventure movie about a monster and a robot. And then it was like, ‘Oh, I know some people that make robots, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation from the Alien franchise that has a linkage to the Predator franchise. What's interesting in Badlands is you're seeing different kinds of synthetic units. Usually, the synthetic unit is something that's meant to blend in with the human crew. But now we find a battalion of synths. These drone hunters that are made to kill.’”

In Predators: Badlands, Elle Fanning stars as Thia, a damaged Weyland-Yutani synthetic who forms an uneasy alliance with a predator named Dek. The story unfolds on a remote, desolate planet where human technology and alien biology collide.

For newcomers to the universe, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is the powerful interstellar conglomerate first introduced in the Alien films, notorious for creating lifelike androids (synths) and exploiting extraterrestrial life for profit. Their inclusion firmly connects Badlands to the broader Alien–Predator continuity, a shared universe explored across decades of films, comics, and games.

Elle said, “This is a Weyland-Yutani synth. Her model knows Genna very, very well. She's been looking at how this planet works, and she has a lot of information that Dek can use from that.”

Predator: Badlands releases in Indian theatres on 7th November in English, Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu.