@onemyke
THE PREDATOR (Hall H – Thursday) – The Marvel Studios may not be doing their big panel in Hall H this year, but throw a stone and you’ll hit someone in the MCU family. Case in point: Thursday’s Hall H activities started off with a *clicking noise* as Iron Man 3 (among other iconic movies) director Shane Black brought the cast and more footage of his newest installment of a already popular sci-fi franchise: The Predator. Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane. Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, Trevante Rhodes, Augusto Aguilera, and Jake Busey joined him onstage to give Predator fans exactly what they’ve been dying to see from the franchise: comedy?! What? You thought that Shane Black wasn’t going to make a Shane Black movie?
They really leaned into it from the get go with a behind the scenes montage of all the actors questioning each other about what other pop culture figures would win in a deathmatch against The Predator. Two things were apparent right off the bat: Keegan Michael Key was going to steal the show with comedy and nerd knowledge and Fox is letting Shane Black do his thing to the point of probably making a Predator movie that’s going to be as divisive as his Mandarin in IM3.
The “Predator Vs. (blank)” hypotheticals didn’t stop after the video, as Shane and the cast eased their way into the discussion. It was hilarious and the cast genuinely seems like they have great chemistry and actually mean it when they say they’ve enjoyed their time together, almost to a point where it’s hard not to want to see most of this same group in a slice of life comedy– not being sliced to death one by one. Their comradery was actually the showcase of the first clip they played for the audience. I’ll save the major recaps of the clips for the sites that have more time on their hands but all I can say is that for the majority of the clip, that features the Loonies — the mercenary group of guys that that make up the cast — talking to Olivia Munn for the first time and it’s mostly an onslaught of jokes with a hard punch of exposition at the end that teases an interesting hook to a Predator movie.
Black did drop his idea for the story on us as only Shane does, “We assume that there’s a faction on the Predator homeworld that’s been bested not once but twice by Earthlings,” Black said. “They sent their champions to Earth and they don’t come home. They don’t like that. So, they figured, they want to punch back. There’s a contentious bunch of Predator homeworld and they might not be above roiding, so to speak … We devised this idea, it’s an idea but it’s mostly an image, it’s mostly something we had to find visually because you can’t alter the make-up of the Predator too thoroughly … we had to emphasize what the Predators do. They’re fast. They’re deadly. They’re live. They move fast and they hit and they strike and retreat and it’s that feeling of deadly purpose and absolute blood curdling fucking efficency. … These guys move like the wind, they come, they cut you, they leave, and you’re cut when they’re done. They kill you. That’s what we wanted. Just these completely savage brutal creatures and then we got us and R-rating!”
Whew. We were then treated to a clip of Munn and Holbrook, who was absent from the panel but recorded tape of him saying hi to Hall H, running from your dad’s Predator, who then gets shanked and messed up by what’s about to be your younger post millennial brother’s Predator 2.0. It was a decent enough tease and Black said that the VFX wasn’t quite done, but without seeing this almost double-sized Super Predator Bros going after our lovable heroes it still feels like Fox and Black is holding back the stuff that’s going to define this Predator against all the others. The clips separately show off the things Black likes to do and what he’s good at, ensemble action comedies and flipping tried and true formulas on their head – or well twisting them until they’re his own specific formula, how that will work in a franchise that hasn’t really opened itself to either of those things, by a director who seems to care about it, will be interesting to see. It’s a shame more of that synthesis wasn’t on display in this otherwise very entertaining panel. 4/5 Bibles.
-Myke Ladiona