Prey director says another Alien vs Predator movie would be “far down the road”

Don’t hold your breath for another Alien vs Predator movie – according to the director of Prey, that’s “far down the road.”

Predator 2 had a geek-shattering Easter Egg: as Harrigan wanders through the Lost Hunters’ ship, he stumbles on their trophies in the throne room. There’s human skulls and spines, the fossil of a dinosaur, and most notably, the head of a Xenomorph.

In a pre-MCU age, the notion of a shared universe between cinema’s fiercest extraterrestrials was mind-blowing. Yet, for years, it seemed it wouldn’t be anything beyond a fun nod to Predator’s big-screen rival. In 2004, Hollywood delivered Alien vs Predator – and audiences suffered the fate of its tagline: “Whoever wins, we lose.”

Mediocrity was enough for a sequel: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, perhaps one of the most shameful movies of all time. Just like Gunnison, plans for a third film were nuked with extreme prejudice. If you’re among the silent minority waiting for another face-off, well, keep waiting.

Minor spoilers for Prey below…

Alien vs Predator is “far down the road” from Prey

Prey, a new Predator prequel on Disney+, follows Naru (Legion’s Amber Midthunder), an aspiring hunter in the Comanche Nation who tries to track down a mysterious beast creating “lightning in the trees” and never-before-seen bloodshed.

One of the film’s best Easter Eggs comes from a French fur tracker, who teaches Naru how to use a gun in exchange for medicine; that gun is inscribed, “Raphael Adolini 1715,” the same gun given to Danny Glover’s character at the end of Predator 2.

Such a connection begs the question: if we’ve seen the origin of the gun, will we see Predators fighting Xenomorphs in another Alien vs Predator movie?

Speaking to Dexerto ahead of Prey’s release, director Dan Trachtenberg said: “I think if that were ever to happen again, it certainly would wanna be far down the road.”

What happened to Alien vs Predator 3?

The Brothers Strause, the directing pair of AVP: Requiem, were ready to hop into a threequel. Regretfully – and perhaps fortunately – paltry box office returns and venomous reviews put the project on hold indefinitely.

In an earlier interview with Gizmodo, the duo opened up about their original plans for AVP 3, which would have taken the battle away from Earth into space.

“The original ending for AVP: Requiem, that we pitched them, ended up on the alien homeward, and actually going from the Predator gun, that you see at the end, it was going to transition from that gun to a logo of a Weyland-Yutani spaceship that was heading to an alien planet,” Greg Strause explained.

“And then we were actually going to cut down to the surface [of the alien planet] and you were going to see a hunt going on. It was going to be a whole tribe of predators going against this creature that we called ‘King Alien.’

“It’s this huge giant winged alien thing. And that was going to be the lead-in, to show that the fact that the Predator gun [at the end of AVP: Requiem] is the impetus of all the technological advancements that allowed humans to travel in space. Which leads up to the Alien timeline.”

Yes, AVP 3 was conceived as a prequel to Alien, before Ridley Scott’s Prometheus took care of that in 2012. Every Alien vs Predator movie thus far takes place outwith the accepted canon of both franchises.

“That was the whole idea, was to literally continue from Ms. Yutani getting the gun – and then cut to 50 years in the future, and there’s spaceships now,” Strause added.

“We’ve made a quantum leap in space travel. That was going to set up the ending, which would then set up what AVP was going to be, which would take place 100 years in the future. That was kind of the plan.”

Prey is available to stream on Disney+.