‘The Predator’ Director Details the Abilities of the Ultimate Predator

A major component of each chapter of the Predator series is the antagonist creature after which the series is named, with various installments introducing all-new threats. The upcoming The Predator introduces audiences to the “Ultimate Predator,” which director Shane Black detailed as something that has long been absent from the series.

“If the [ultimate] predator was to be an amalgam of, not just an ordinary predator, but also a collection of traits garnered from the various most powerful species that they’ve hunted, then you basically would have one that is stronger, faster, and smarter,” Black detailed of the new creature to Entertainment Weekly. “We finally got an image that we liked, which captures this very canny, very cunning, and effortlessly powerful, savage predator. One of the only quibbles that I’ve had with some of the past predators is that, if you’re not careful, it can look like a guy in a football suit; big, bulky guy just stomping around. I wanted a certain more graceful, more light, more athletic quality, literally like a predator. If you watch a cheetah, it’s not clunky.”

With the original Predator creature having appeared in five previous films, the challenge for the new film became how to deliver audiences something new to strike fear into the hearts of not only the characters, but the audiences themselves.

“The challenge became to make it frightening,” Black recently shared with Empire. “‘Cause upon that hinged everything — whether you bought our heroes going up against him and felt a real threat for them. We had to invent a scenario in which the Predators were mysterious and scary again.”

From the outer reaches of space to the small-town streets of suburbia, the hunt comes home in Shane Black‘s explosive reinvention of the Predator series. Now, the universe’s most lethal hunters are stronger, smarter and deadlier than ever before, having genetically upgraded themselves with DNA from other species. When a young boy accidentally triggers their return to Earth, only a ragtag crew of ex-soldiers and a disgruntled science teacher can prevent the end of the human race.

The Predator stars Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, Alfie Allen, Thomas Jane, Augusto Aguilera, Yvonne Strahovski, and Jake Busey.

The Predator lands in theaters on September 14th.

Do you think the new creature can have as much of an impact as the original hunter? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!

[H/T Entertainment Weekly]