There’s an obvious lack of creative necessity to Hollywood’s overwhelming churn of prequels, sequels, remakes, reboots and revisions, more so by the minute, as studio-owned streaming services plunder back catalogues for more ways they can exploit known properties. Upcoming TV shows based on Fatal Attraction, Alien, Grease, Mr and Mrs Smith, The Lord of the Rings and Reality Bites and films based on The Killer, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Crow, White Men Can’t Jump, Road House, Scarface and The Bodyguard are all so commercially inevitable that it’s almost hard to be angry, each new announcement deserving little more than a resigned shrug. It’s business, not pleasure.
So on the rare occasion that this practice offers up something that feels even mildly outside of the algorithm, as if perhaps maybe a human might have come up with it rather than a spreadsheet, it’s hard not to give it more credit than it often deserves. Fox AKA Disney AKA Hulu AKA Disney+ in international territories has dragged the Predator series back to life once again for a seventh outing (two Predators, two Alien vs Predators, a Predators and a The Predator make six) but rather than continuing down the same well-trodden road, they’ve taken a left turn and then gone back around 300 years.
