The Next Predator Movie: What’s Actually Confirmed So Far

Prey landed on streaming in 2022 and rescued a franchise most people had written off. An animated anthology followed in mid-2025. A theatrical entry, Badlands, arrived that November and pushed the series somewhere it had never gone. After that run, nothing has been scheduled.

That silence is why searches for the next Predator movie keep rising while the answers online keep disagreeing with each other. One page insists a sequel is locked in. Another claims the director has moved on entirely. Neither holds up under scrutiny.

Quick answer: There is currently no announced release date for the next Predator movie. Predator: Badlands remains the most recent film in the series. A follow-up to Prey and at least one further project from director Dan Trachtenberg are in development, but no title, cast or theatrical date has been confirmed by the studio.

Is there a new Predator movie coming out

Almost certainly — but “coming out” implies a date, and there isn’t one.

What exists is a set of ingredients rather than a finished announcement. A director who has said repeatedly that he is planning the franchise’s next chapter. A studio that has treated the property as a genuine priority for the first time in years. A recent film that closed on a deliberately unresolved thread. And a fanbase large enough, across enough countries, to make another entry commercially obvious.

What does not exist: a title, a shooting schedule, a cast list, or a slot on any studio’s release calendar.

That gap between intention and confirmation is where most of the misinformation lives. A director saying he has ideas is not a greenlight. A studio executive expressing enthusiasm is not a production start. Both things get reported, then reposted, then eventually rewritten with a year attached that nobody ever announced.

So the accurate position is this: very likely, entirely undated, and formally unannounced. Anyone offering you a firm release year right now is guessing and hoping you won’t check.

What was the last Predator movie released

Predator: Badlands, and it changed the shape of what the series is allowed to be.

The film moved the action off Earth entirely, to a hostile planet far in the future, and made a young outcast hunter the protagonist rather than the threat. That inversion had never been attempted in a live-action entry. For nearly forty years the creature had functioned as the antagonist — something to survive, outwit or escape. Badlands asked audiences to root for one instead, and paired him with a damaged synthetic companion for a story that leaned as much on odd-couple dynamics as on stalking and violence.

Commercially, it worked without breaking records. The film grossed somewhere in the region of $184 million worldwide against a production budget of roughly $105 million, which is a respectable result once you account for marketing spend on top. Notably, international takings roughly matched domestic ones — a useful signal for a franchise whose next entry will need to travel.

Its second life mattered more. The film reached digital purchase and rental in early 2026, then arrived on streaming weeks later, where it performed strongly across multiple territories. Studios pay close attention to that curve. A film that keeps finding an audience after its theatrical run is a much easier case to make for a sequel than one that simply opens well and disappears.

Has a Predator: Badlands sequel been officially announced

No — and that distinction is worth holding onto, because plenty of coverage smudges it.

Badlands ends on an unmistakable hook. Threads are left dangling on purpose, a new force is introduced in the closing moments, and the surviving characters are placed in a position that only makes sense if someone intends to continue their story. That is sequel architecture. Architecture is not a sequel.

No title has been registered publicly. No release date has been claimed. No cast members have been announced as returning, and no production start has been confirmed. Everything currently circulating about a Badlands follow-up is extrapolation from the ending itself, which is a reasonable thing for fans to do and a terrible thing for a website to present as news.

There is also a structural reason to stay cautious. Trachtenberg has been consistent that he does not think in sequels. His three entries were a period prequel set in the eighteenth century, an animated anthology spanning multiple eras, and an alien-planet survival story with no human lead. Each was designed as a separate front door into the franchise, not as chapter four of a serial.

A direct continuation is plausible. It is not the safe bet.

What’s happening with Prey 2

Prey 2 is the most requested sequel this franchise has produced in decades, and it has spent a long time in the same holding pattern: development, without movement.

The appeal is easy to understand. Prey did something the series had never managed — it left its hero alive and worth following. Almost every previous protagonist either died or was written into a corner that made a return awkward. Naru survived, and survived intelligently, which created the first genuine opportunity for a returning lead.

Here is where the confusion comes from. At different points, the project has been described as actively in development and as something the director stepped away from in favour of fresher ideas. Both accounts contain truth, taken from different moments in a process that has run for several years. A sequel can be alive at a studio and simultaneously not be the thing its original director wants to make next.

What is not in dispute: no release date, no confirmed casting, no cameras rolling. If you see a Prey 2 date circulating, it was invented by someone downstream of the actual reporting.

Is Dan Trachtenberg still making Predator movies

Yes. A separate studio deal did not end that, despite a wave of coverage implying otherwise.

The confusion arose when he signed a first-look agreement with a different studio to develop original material. Because the Predator property sits elsewhere, a lot of headlines treated this as a departure. It isn’t one. A first-look deal means one studio gets the first opportunity to consider his original concepts. It does not prevent him from working on another studio’s franchise, and these arrangements run in parallel all the time across the industry.

He has addressed it directly and without much ambiguity, describing himself as working out the franchise’s next steps alongside his other commitments, and comparing the current moment to the period after Prey — when he had several ideas at once and two of them ended up being produced simultaneously.

There is also a loose end worth remembering. He has said that after Prey he had three concepts in mind. Two became the animated anthology and Badlands. The third has never been made, and by his own account it was the one he was most eager to reach.

Whatever comes next may well be that.

Will Arnold Schwarzenegger return to the franchise

He has publicly said he expects to, which is meaningful without being decisive.

The context matters. His character from the 1987 original has hovered at the edge of the modern films for years — referenced, alluded to, and at one point briefly represented in animated form. Reports have also suggested that an early version of the Badlands script included a cameo that did not survive to the finished film.

Treat this as intent rather than casting. An actor saying a director wants him in a project sits a long way from a signed contract and a shooting schedule. But it does tell you something useful about the shape of what’s being considered: a project with room inside it for the original film’s legacy, rather than another clean break from everything that came before.

For a global audience, that legacy is a genuine asset. The 1987 film travelled further and lasted longer than almost anything else in the series, and its central character remains recognisable in markets where the newer entries have less footing.

Could the next Predator movie be a crossover

It’s on the table, and the studio has been notably unwilling to rule it out.

The two properties have crossed over before, in the mid-2000s, and those films are widely regarded as the low point for both. That history cuts two ways. It makes another attempt commercially attractive — the concept still sells itself in a single sentence, in any language — and creatively risky, because the current era has worked hard to distance itself from exactly that period.

The connective tissue is already being laid. The modern films have quietly introduced corporate and technological elements that belong to the wider shared universe, including through the synthetic character introduced in Badlands. None of that commits anyone to anything, but it keeps the door propped open.

If a crossover does happen, expect it to look nothing like the previous attempts. The people steering this franchise have shown no interest in repeating a formula, even a profitable one.

When could the next Predator movie realistically arrive?

Work backwards from an announcement that hasn’t happened yet.

A live-action genre film at this scale typically needs roughly a year of pre-production and principal photography, followed by something close to another year of visual effects and post-production. Marketing usually begins six to nine months before release, which is why teaser material tends to appear long after a film has actually finished shooting.

Nothing has been announced. Nothing is filming. That arithmetic pushes a realistic theatrical window for a live-action entry into 2028 at the earliest, and later if development takes another year to settle.

An animated entry is the exception to all of this. The 2025 anthology demonstrated that the franchise can run an animated production in parallel with a live-action one, on a lighter budget, a shorter schedule and a streaming release. If the next thing announced is animated, it could land considerably sooner and in more countries simultaneously.

Franchise timeline at a glance

Year	Release	Format
1987	Predator	Theatrical
1990	Predator 2	Theatrical
2004	Alien vs. Predator	Theatrical
2007	Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem	Theatrical
2010	Predators	Theatrical
2018	The Predator	Theatrical
2022	Prey	Streaming
2025	Predator: Killer of Killers	Streaming, animated
2025	Predator: Badlands	Theatrical
TBA	Next Predator movie	Unannounced

What’s actually keeping the franchise alive right now?

Comics and merchandise — and that is not a throwaway detail.

The Predator has maintained a steady publishing schedule between films, including crossovers with other well-known properties that have their own international followings. These books have firm release dates, which is more than any film can currently claim. They also serve a strategic function: they keep the character visible during a gap, exactly as they did during the long drought before Prey.

Collectible figures, game content and home-media releases perform the same job. None of it tells you when the next film arrives. All of it tells you the rights holder has no intention of letting the property go quiet.

How will you know a new Predator movie is real?

Four signals, and they almost always appear in this order.

First, a credible trade report naming a director or writer attached to the project. Second, casting news. Third, a dated slot appearing on the studio’s theatrical release calendar — often months before any title is made public. A teaser is the last step, not the first.

What is not a signal: concept art shared on social media, video thumbnails promising a date, aggregator posts recycling a two-year-old interview quote under a fresh headline, or fan-made trailers assembled from unrelated footage. The gap since Badlands has produced an enormous volume of all four, and they circulate especially fast in regions where local entertainment coverage relies on translating and reposting English-language rumour.

If a claim doesn’t trace back to a studio statement or a recognised trade publication, treat it as fiction until it does.

Key Takeaways

• No next Predator movie has been announced, titled or dated.
• Predator: Badlands, released in November 2025, remains the most recent film and is available on streaming in most territories.
• A Badlands sequel has not been confirmed, despite the film’s open ending.
• A follow-up to Prey remains in development with no date and no confirmed cast.
• The director’s separate studio agreement has not ended his involvement with the franchise.
• A realistic theatrical window is 2028 or later; an animated entry could arrive sooner.
• Comics and merchandise are the only Predator releases with firm dates at present.

Who should keep watching, and who can safely wait

If you follow film industry coverage, keep watching. The next genuine development will be a director or writer attachment reported by a major trade publication, and given how openly both the studio and the director have discussed continuing, that could surface with little warning.

If you simply want to know when to book a ticket, wait. There is nothing to plan around yet. The most reliable place a date will appear first is the studio’s official release slate, usually before any title is public and well before a trailer exists.

And if you haven’t seen the last three films, this gap is the ideal time to close it. Each was deliberately built as a standalone entry point, so there is no wrong place to start — and all three are widely available on streaming across most regions.

Status accurate at the time of writing. Franchise plans change; check the studio’s official release slate for the current position.

FAQ