It seems that there is a clear rule that any movie based on a famous franchise will be criticized for not fulfilling certain requirements. The announcement that Disney was producing a Predator prequel movie with a female lead was met with negative reactions on social media. The fans denounced the demise of the Predator franchise.
Note that the last few movies of the franchise didn’t really set the world on fire. Moreover, Prey has received more reviews than the Arnold Schwarzenegger film. However, trolls continued to react negatively to Amber Midthunder’s Naru. Director Dan Trachtenberg claims this is because the fans misremember John McTiernan’s Predator from 1987.
Prey is set many years before Arnie faced the bug-ugly alien from the jungle. While many Predator movies tried to introduce something new, the current one brought something familiar back to the franchise. Prey doesn’t have flashy locations or complicated storylines. Instead, it focuses on the simple concept of Predator against Prey at their most brutal and rawest.
Recently, Director Trachtenberg expressed this on Radio 1’s Screen Time podcast. He dismissed the complaints saying that Midthunder’s ability to deal with a powerful Predator is unbelievable. The issue is fans do not recall the core conflict in the original movie. Below is what he originally stated in the podcast:
“There was a very strange reaction, too, in… it’s almost a Mandela Effect thing of the way people misremember the original movie. […] But I never really wanted to correct that thinking, because it helps the movie. This movie is more exciting the more you feel like, ‘How is she gonna pull this off?’ […] I’m happy for people to think that way, even if you think a little bit harder about Predator, the end of that movie is where she begins, you know? Like he ends up in a place where, all the Comanches sort of have that knowledge-base that Arnold has to resort to, so… But I was happy for people to forget that. I think people remember Predator as, ‘Guys with big guns fight the thing,’ you know?”
