ScreenCrush: The Podcast! - PREDATOR Franchise RECAP (1987-2025) Everything You Need to Know Before BADLANDS

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

ScreenCrush The Podcast tackles all the movie and TV hot topics, offering reviews and analysis of Marvel, Star Wars, and everything you care about right now. Hosted by Ryan Arey, and featuring a panel of industry professionals.

This is everything you need to know before watching Predator Badlands. Welcome back Screen Crush, I'm Ryan Erie. And this movie Predator Badlands is set in the distant future. So it's not just a predator sequel, it's also going to incorporate elements of the alien franchise. So let's dive deep into this entire franchise and the Yacha culture. Yacha, I thought this is everyone was talking about predators. We are, Doug. That's what their species is called, the Yacha, and they are some of the most ruthless, cold-blooded killing machines in the entire galaxy. But a very specific, unique culture that sets them apart from other aliens. Now, their origins have never really been explored in the movies,

but the comics have defined the values of this species. Now, while their advanced technology may make them seem like a hyper-intelligent species, it's not actually their technology. The Yacha are the descendants of the Hish, who originally inhabited their homeworld of Yacha Prime until they were invaded by another alien race called the Amengi. Now, the Amengi are an insectoid-like race with a superiority complex. Now, their design was actually based on the original design for the predator,

when Jean-Claude Van Dam was going to run around in a green-screen suit. But then, James Cameron supposedly gave Stan Winston the iconic piece of advice to add mandibles. He made his biggest contribution to the company. Ad mandibles. Now, after a few generations of rule, the Amengi then became complacent until one of the Hish slaves caught them slacking and started a full-on revolution. The Hish then adopted the Amengi technology, but they don't really know how it works. Hence, where they always toss it out the second it breaks or becomes damage,

since they have no idea how to repair it. But the technology was not the most significant cultural impact of their enslavement. Rather, it forced them to prove themselves as superior beings, which eventually led their culture to create a sacred dogma around ritualistic hunting the galaxy's strongest predators. Now, we see this idea in the very first movie in our Predator Timeline, Predator Killer of Killers, which opens with a message from the Yacha Codex reading, Go forth among the stars and seek only the strongest prey, become the killer of killers. Now, one of their favorite places to hunt is Earth.

They've actually been coming here so long, early civilizations worshipped them as gods. In the very first Aliens v. Predator movie, we would even learn that humans would sacrifice themselves to incubate xenomorph eggs, so the predators would then have elite prey to hunt. But more on that later. So in part one of Killer of Killers called The Shield, we meet a Viking raider named Ursa. She and her son are on a revenge quest when she's targeted by a brute predator with an electromagnetic punch. Now, then they named this predator the Grindle after the legendary monster from the story of Bayeowel. After losing the oversized Yacha by hiding in a frozen lake,

Ursa introduces him to the wrong end of an anchor and becomes the first human we know of to take down the intergalactic predator. However, the only reward she gets for her ice bath is losing her son and being put on ice herself, frozen and shipped off to Yacha Prime alongside other historic human hunters, including a samurai-turned ninja from feudal Japan named Kenji. Now, Kenji was hunted during a revenge mission he took against his brother, who betrayed him to become his father's successor at an early age. After almost taking out his brother, he's confronted by an Oni predator, who takes out an entire

palace full of guards just to get his hands on him. In the end, Kenji takes out the Oni with a little help from his brother, who survived the initial fall, only to fall in the final fight. Now, unlike Grindle, the Oni predator is much skinnier and lacks upper mandibles, which shows the variation among members of the species, but what he lacks in fangs, he makes up for an honor. Now, I want to take a second to tell you guys about something pretty exciting that's going on in my life. See, I realized that I was gaining a lot of weight because I was stress eating all day long. I was eating without thinking about it and I kind of just constantly needed some kind of oral fixation to help me cope with all of this work-related anxiety. On top of this, I have my facial

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It's this little rubber piece on the end that's great for chewing. So if you've ever been thinking about changing your habits, this is the perfect first step. Go to Trifume.com slash Screencrush or scan the QR code on screen to grab yours today. Now, back to what I was saying. Now, as savage as the Yacha may seem, predators do follow a code, or at least most of them do.

They have a very specific set of rules that determine what kind of kills are honorable or dishonorable. And they punish the hunters who don't follow the code. However, the Predators' Code of Honor doesn't just determine how they fight, but whether they fight at all. We see this during the next hunt on our timeline, which isn't from Killer of Killers, but rather from Dan Tractenberg's first experiment with the franchise, 2022's Prey. Now, the film follows Nauru, a Comanche woman,

as she hunts a feral predator in the early American Great Plains around 1709. Like the other yacha we've seen, this feral predator has a slightly different look than the iconic movie monster that we're used to. They're from a part of Yacha Prime with a much drier climate, which could be where we see Dack and his father fighting in the Badlands trailers. Now, ironically, Nauru stumbled upon the feral predator, while she was also trying to prove herself on a hunt. But when she ran, he saw her as unworthy prey

and decided not to waste his time. So another key aspect of the Yacha code is that you can only hunt worthy prey. Kill me! I'm here, kill me! They specifically avoid pregnant women, the sick, children, or the defenseless because doing so dishonors their legacy. In Nauru's case, he underestimates her

because of her recent hunting failures and she ends up being one of the first humans to take advantage of their arrogance. She ambushes the predator using a pistol, that she stole from French fur traders and then traps him in a mud pit before using its own bolt-action crossbow to finish it off. Why does he use a bird, not a gun? Well, because the Yacha always want as even odds as possible. They find weapons like guns and lasers less honorable than traditional weapons like swords and spears, even if their traditional weapons are still much more advanced

than ours. However, like the other humans who walked away from a fight with the Yacha, Nauru's success was short-lived. As we see in the post-credit scene in Killer of Killers, she was taken aboard the Yacha warship like the others. But the pistol she used, was taken as a trophy and remember it for later. And that takes us back to Predator Killer of Killers. In the third chapter, Bullets, we meet John J. Torres, a U.S. Navy fighter pilot during World War II. His squadron was attacked by a unique Yacha pilot who specifically hunted other sentient spacefaring creatures. After some insane aerial gymnastics, Torres takes out the Predator pilot, only to be captured by the Yacha and placed into Cryoslie. And that takes us to the very first Predator movie

ever released. Now, Predator is one of the greatest action movies of all time. And to celebrate it, we have designed this awesome new parody merch at our merch store. To honor the manliest handshake in cinema history, we have the Dylan and Dutch. And we also have the greatest lines from the movie, Get to Dechoppa! And I ain't got time to bleed. And in honor of Badlands, we also have Deck the Predator, a spoof of Dora the Explorer. And in the other side of this franchise, we have a xenomorph Tomogachi, and the classics Zeno cereal and a chestburster with a hat and cane, like in Spaceballs. Shopping our merch store is the best way to directly support our channel, and links for these are below.

And now you can become a store member to earn rewards and get free stuff. Now, back to what I was saying. So the hunt and predator pits Major Allen Dutch Schaefer against the iconic version of the monster that we all know and love, the Jungle Clan Predator. These guys specifically prefer hot, moist climates and heavily wooded areas for their high vantage points and their potential for parkour. After being duped by the CIA,

Dutch's squad is stalked by a predator who kills the elite mercenaries one by one. But Dutch exploits the pressur. predator's biggest weakness by covering himself in mud. Are they afraid of clog pores or something? Not quite Doug, the yachts see in infrared. Now, they can use their helmets to better distinguish between two subjects in hot environments or to scan for additional information, but if someone's able to mask their body temperature, they're completely blind.

Dutch uses the weakness to get close and go face to mandible-covered face in the final showdown. The predator even tosses its tech to even the odds, another Yacha tradition to honor a well-matched adversary. So Dutch ends up trapping him, but the Yacha triggers a bomb, which, according to the Yacha code, is the best way to defend one's honor in the face of defeat. It not only denies the enemy the kill, but it also ensures their technology doesn't fall into the hands of lesser species. So Dutch will go the rest of his life trying to find out everything he can about the creature that killed his crew. But like the others,

his journey also ends with him being frozen and placed in cryosleep with other victorious humans. Now, of course, while Guatemala put Yatcha on the radar for humans, that would not stop them from returning for another hunt 10 years later in Los Angeles, which brings us to Predator 2. This time, the yacht just set out to hunt the most dangerous cops and cartel members off the streets of L.A. during the height of a heated summer gang war. This put the intergalactic bounty hunters in the crosshairs of Detective Mike Harrigan, who is your classic bad 80s movie cop, complete with the proclivity for excessive use of force. Now, he thinks he's tracking down some deranged cartel member until the CIA recognizes the predator as the same creature from Guatemala. The city

hunter, also called Ghost, is a step up from the jungle predator that we saw before. He sees through the humans ploy to disguise their heat signatures, and he even heals himself between fights using a field med kid. Now eventually, Harrigan locates the predator's ship under the city where he finds the creature's massive collection of trophy skulls before taking on the hunter himself. Like Nauru, Harrigan uses one of the Yacha's own blades against him and becomes yet another human who is able to outmatch a predator. However, since Ghost wasn't able to activate his self-destruct sequence, his Yacha brethren came to retrieve his body from the ship, and one of the Yacha gives Harrigan that flintlocked pistol as a trophy. Yes, the same one that I mentioned before, meaning that somehow

they got it back. The predators respect him so much that they also take Harigan into cryo sleep, alongside Dutch, and Nauru, as we saw in the post-credit scene from Killer of Killers. However, they were the lucky ones to remain frozen while Ursa, Kenji, and Torres were not, which takes us to the final chapter of Killer of Killers, the battle. Now, the humans are taken to a massive Coliseum on the Predator Homeworld, Yacha Prime. The Yacha challenged the champions to fight to the death, with the winner receiving the honor of battling the warlord or the Grendel King, as Ursa called him. Each of them was given a weapon from their time in a translation color so they can all speak the same language, but Torres was given the flintlock pistol. So this arena battle shows just how central

violence is to the Yacha culture. Eventually, the humans band together and hijack a predator's ship. Now, the Yacha temporarily hooked the ship with a harpoon until Ursa sacrifices herself so she can reunite with her son in Bahala. Torres and Kenji break free and escape the Coliseum, and then the warlord sends an army of hunting parties to follow them in pursuit. Now, we haven't seen quite yet how that pursuit plays out, but the ending teases more to come, showing the yacha's cryo chambers full of the strongest human and non-human prey that the yacha have faced, which is more than a little bit ironic for Harrington, given Predator 2's impact on the franchise. You see, the biggest revelation from the Trophy Room in Predator 2 wasn't what happened in the Trophy Room. It was one of

the trophies themselves, which included a xenomorph skull. Now, the skull was originally included as a joke on set, but it ended up tying these two franchises together. We got Alien versus Predator comic books and Alien vs. Predator movies, and eventually, it turned out that xenomorphs are actually a core part of Yatcha culture. They consider the xenomorphs sacred as they are the perfect prey, because, as we learn in the alien movies, the Xenos are the perfect life form. They have evolved some of the galaxy's most terrifying defense mechanisms as a means to survive. The Yatchas see them as natural opposite and use them for bloodings. Now, a blooding ritual is the process that all young yacha must undergo as a violent right of passage for their young, which usually requires them to

kill a xenomorph and mark themselves with its acid blood. It's an incredibly important ceremony that not only allows the yacha to go on their own hunts, but even determines their mating status back on Yacha Prime. Oh no, he's hot! And we see one of these rituals firsthand in 2004's Alien versus Predator. After discovering a temple deep below the Arctic ice, an expedition crew from Wayland Corps finds themselves caught in the crossfire of a young Yacha ambition and a hive of Zenos. As they try to navigate this ancient Yacha ruins, one of the Wayland employees, Alexa Woods, forms an alliance with the newly blooded Yacha and escapes after taking down the Xenomorph queen. The Yacha are impressed by her,

and then they mark her as one of their blooded. Unlike the others, though, we don't see her frozen in the Yacha warship. So it seems that her actions truly make the Yatchez see her as their own, which is rare since they're all about legacy and genetic purity. Now, after the predators leave Earth, a pred alien burst from the dead hunter's chest and eliminates the Yacha crew one by one before crashing in small town Gunnison, Colorado. Now, when the distress signal arrives back at Yacha Prime, they send a veteran Zeno hunter named Wolf, who quickly makes work of the entire hive. However, that Pred Alien hybrid is much harder to kill.

Unlike the other human-bred xenomorphs, the Pred alien gains many of the Yatch's superior genetics and may have even ended up on top in this fight if the U.S. military hadn't decided to break up the battle with a nuke. Now, because the nuke takes out Wolf before he could cover his tracks, the humans can recover some Yacha weaponry that eventually winds up in the hands of Utoni Corps. Utani eventually merges with Wayland Corps. That's the group that funded the expedition in the first Alien vs. Predator film, and the new company will be called Wayland Utani. That is the main evil corporation that's always picking up Zenos

and trying to haul them back to Earth in the alien franchise. Now, they're also responsible for some of the more advanced technology. specifically the synthetics. Those are artificial people who assist employees on deep space expeditions. Now, while synthetics are usually exclusive to the alien franchise, the trailers make it clear that they are a big part of predator badlands. And we also know from the game, alien colonial marines, that sometime in the future, Wayland Utani sets up massive labs on foreign planets called origin facilities, where they breed live specimens and study the planet's most dangerous species, which is an idea that they may have borrowed from the yacha who do the same thing in their quest for genetic purity.

So in addition to hunting prey on other worlds, the yachtsia would create their own hunting grounds by shipping and collections of the most dangerous prey throughout the galaxy and dropping them on their intergalactic game preserve, which is exactly what we see in the movie Predators. So unlike the other films, this one kicks off after several of the world's deadliest killers and mercenaries wake up, thousands of feet in the air hurling toward the ground. They quickly learned that this is a Yacha game preserve, and they find a group of super predators are hunting them. Super predators? Weren't they super enough already?

This is an entirely different class, Doug. The yacha are obsessed with genetic purity and breeding only the strongest traits. Certain yacha clans have done this differently, leading to some discourse among the yacha about what makes one genetically superior. And by discourse, I mean civil war, genocide, and generational blood feuds between certain clans and tribes. One of the most notable is between the jungle predators and the super predators. This is why this crew of killers discovers a yacha scouting camp where they are holding a smaller

yacha prisoner. So an American mercenary named Royce tries to free the captive yacha in exchange for a ride home, but the super predators destroy the ship before it can take off. Now, when the super predators hear about this, they start taking out members of the group one by one as they make their way back to the site. In the end, Royce does make it out alive by drugging one of the group members and giving the yacha a taste of their own medicine, defeating the last of the super predators. But now, he is permanently trapped on the game preserve.

Now, while predators introduce some of the beefiest predators we've ever seen, and even the beasts between them, the predator took them to new, levels, for better or worse. Now, the predator certainly has its flaws and parts of it may require a loose interpretation of canon, but it is chronologically the most recent film in the predator timeline. After a yachtah ship crash lands on Earth, an army ranger named Quinn incapacitates a predator who is immediately sent off to a research lab for study. So they conclude that the predators have some human DNA and that the yacha are actually collecting DNA from the most dangerous creatures in the galaxy to improve their own genetics. Yeah, but I thought you just said they're all about

genetic purity and stuff. Right. So let's just say this is a massive misconception on their part. And I don't think this is actually part of Yatchelor. Everyone in this film is like glaringly in way over their heads because they're so eager to make the next significant discovery. Eventually, the predator escapes and recovers most of his gear, but he's still missing a few pieces, which were sent to Quinn's house and now his son turns them into a Halloween costume. But the kid accidentally uses it to roast a couple of bullies, setting off the predator's hounds. His dad rescues him and tries to return the predator's equipment, only to be intercepted by the Ultimate Predator. It is massive with enhanced DNA, a bulletproof exoskeleton, and natural camouflage.

The Ultimate Predator notices that Quinn's son is autistic, which he sees as a potential advancement for human evolution. Before he can kidnap him, Quinn and the crew overpower the giant predator using his own weapon. The final shot also reveals that they recovered something that was ejected from the Yacha ship, which turns out to be an Iron Man-like predator body armor designed for a human. Next time, baby. It turns out that the initial predator was a fugitive who came to deliver the predator killer armor to humans to give them a fair fight in an incoming invasion. Now, I don't know if this invasion's ever going to happen, or if it's even going to be mentioned in Predator Badlands, or whether or not

we should just all collectively agree to forget this movie ever happened. But either way, Badlands picks up the story nearly 300 years later, with Thack, an unblooded yacha on his first hunt, trying to prove himself to his father. Now, it's actually going to be the first time we've ever seen a yachta as a protagonist, and that alone should be enough to show this iconic species in a whole new light. But guys, that is the entire Predator Movie timeline and everything you need to know before you see Predator Badlands. Are you excited to see the Yacha as the star of the show? Are there any details we missed? What's your favorite Predator movie or show? And if you love this video, be sure to let me know in the comments or at me on Twitter, Blue Sky Threads at Ryan Airy. But if you hated it,

blame Dod, the writer of this video, you can find his links below. And if it's your first time here, welcome to the channel. Please subscribe, smash that bell for alerts. For Screen Crush, I'm Ryan Erie.