The Predator franchise is in the midst of a major resurgence, thanks to the latest run of films made by filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg. Prey (2022), Predator: Killer of Killers, and Predator: Badlands not only introduced bold new lore about the Predator race, the Yautja, they also helped pull a lot of the scattered lore from previous Predator movies together into a more cohesive whole.
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Now that Predator feels like one franchise universe, there is a lot more room for debate over rankings. After Trachtenberg’s run (and Shane Black’s 2019 film), we now know there are at least two different races of Yautja, separated into multiple clans (like the Jungle and Desert clans), each with its own class hierarchy. There are “super” variations of Yautja that have either been bred or engineered to help their race evolve and kill better, as well as fringe or “lost” tribes that follow their own customs, like the Warlord’s Clan, Lost Tribe, or Njohrr’s Clan. Each of these different Yautja sects comes with its own strengths and weaknesses that help to determine our rankings.
The 16 Yautja who have appeared in the Predator movies are all listed below, ranked by power. Do you agree with the order?
16. Crucified Predator (Predators)
At the bottom of the list has to be the one Yautja that we ever saw used as a punching bag. The “Crucified Predator” is a classic Jungle Clan Yautja who is chained up by the rival “Super Predator” race on the Game Preserve Planet, in the film Predators (2010). The Crucified Predator never got a chance to shine: he’s freed by human mercenary Royce (Adrien Brody) and proceeds to get beaten down swiftly and murdered by the Super Predators leader, the “Berserker.” According to Yautja culture, the Crucified Predator is the lowest of the low.
15. Jungle Hunter (Predator)
The monster that started the franchise is a Jungle Clan Yautja who made sport of Special Forces soldiers in a remote, war-torn jungle, on Earth in the 1980s. The Original Predator mostly earned its kills through stealth and one-on-one assassinations before losing a fight to Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a soldier who only had his environment and training to use as his weapons. The Yautja wouldn’t really respect that as “power” At all.
14. The City Hunter (Predator 2)
There are several spinoff tribes amongst the Yautja: the “Bad Bloods” that taint their DNA through hybridization or other intermixing, or “Lost Tribes” that have broken off from the main homeworld and tribe factions, to (literally) go their own way. Predator 2 features a “Lost Tribe” of Yautja who settled in 1990s Los Angeles by hiding their ship beneath the urban metropolis. One member of the tribe felt compelled to hunt and is the main antagonist of the film, known as the “City Hunter.”
The City Hunter’s official tribe affiliation was never specified; his appearance was close to the Original Predator, in terms of size and aesthetic. At least he died fighting a human who was wielding one of his own weapons, and the trophy case on the Lost Tribe’s ship showed that they had taken out xenomorphs and all kinds of other fierce aliens. You get points for that.
13. Feral Predator (Prey)
The Feral Predator was at the top of his game in terms of hunting, strategy, and combat prowess. But let’s be honest, even a Yautja of the extremist Warlord Clan has to be low in the rankings, considering he was hunting in the year 1719, using primitive gear and weaponry, when other members of his tribe, seen hunting in Viking Times, Feudal Japan, and WWII, all used superior technology and had more power, cunning, or both. Plus: the Feral Predator got lured into a trap and taken out with his own gun by the most unlikely hunter of her tribe (Naru).
12. Falconer Predator (Predators)
The Super Predators are the stronger race of Yautja, who are bigger in size and greater in power than the traditional Jungle Yautja. There were three Super Predators introduced in the film Predators; the “Berserker” was clearly the alpha and most accomplished hunter, but in the franchise lore, his two companions were lower-caste hunters, possibly even young hunters completing a rite of passage by hunting elite prey on the Game Preserve Planet. The Falconer Predator commanded a mechanical drone that could track targets from a bird’s eye view. It was a cool gimmick, but ultimately, the Falconer died in a sword fight with Yakuza enforcer Changchien (Louis Ozawa), which marks him as the weakest of the three.
11. Tracker Predator (Predators)
The Tracker was a Super Predator with an expertise in tracking targets, including using his own highly-trained monster “dogs.” He was good enough that a longtime human survivor of the Game Preserve Planet, Noland (Laurence Fishburne), basically had to organize his entire life around avoiding the Tracker at all costs. The Tracker was making solid work of taking out the cadre of killers who were dumped on the Game Preserve Planet, but he didn’t count on Russian Spetnaz soldier Nikolai’s (Oleg Taktarov) kamikaze move of blowing himself (and the Tracker) up.
10. WWII Pilot Predator (Predator: Killer of Killers)
The Warlord’s Clan is a fringe sect of the Desert Clan of Yautja, which has abandoned a lot of traditional hunting customs that the other clans adhere to. The main divergence is that the Warlord’s Clan doesn’t honor the hunter’s code of rewarding any hunter who bests them; instead, they kidnap victorious hunters and keep them frozen in cryostasis. They thaw them out for big “event” hunts or tournaments, testing themselves against the best killers in the galaxy. Naturally, that makes them one of the most powerful Yautja clans around.
The “WWII Predator” might have once been a powerful hunter, but the loss of an eye and other injuries clearly ended that run. Instead of dying, the Yautja adapted and became a master pilot who made aerial combat his new form of hunt. He was unrivaled in combat during WWII, but he can’t be ranked too high because his ship was the weapon.
9. Berserker Predator (Predators)
The Berserker was the strongest of the Super Predator hunting party on the Game Preserve Planet, as made clear in his duel with the Crucifided Predator, wherein the Berserker easily overcame and killed his rival. The Berserker survived the longest, had the biggest body count, and showed some of the most cunning strategies for hunting and killing his prey. But, in the end, human mercenary Royce turned out to be meaner and more ruthless than the Berserker, using one member of his party (Topher Grace) as a sacrificial lamb to weaken and wound the Berserker before finishing him off. The Yautja never expected a human to act like such a monster.
8. Fugitive Predator (The Predator)
The lore of Predator starts to get murky when you get into the hybrids. The Fugitive Predator was a Yautja-human hybrid who came to Earth in the 2010s and was actually on a benevolent mission to aid humanity in taking on Yautja hunters. The hybrid was clearly some kind of upgraded form of Yautja, since enhancement was the entire point of hybridization experiments. There’s also the compelling point that “Upgrade Predator” was bred specifically to have the power, speed, and intelligence to hunt down and kill the Fugitive Predator, marking him as a special kind of target.
7. Kwei (Predator: Badlands)
The Desert Clans of Yautja have been the focus of a lot of Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator movies, but Predator: Badlands made an independent clan the main protagonists of the film. It was a Shakespearean tragedy about a family where the unlikeliest “runt” among a proud royal family (Dek) is outcast by his father and must prove his worth before returning home for revenge. The catalyst is Dek’s older brother, a great hunter named Kwei, sacrificing himself in a duel with their father, to save his little brother. Kwei was a top elite hunter in a top elite clan, and judging by his other family members, we feel confident ranking him this high, despite having the shortest screen time of any Yuatja character.
6. Grendel Predator
The “Grendel” gets its name from Earth’s Viking warriors (led by Ursa), who mistake it for a mythical monster when they encounter it during the Viking raids on Scandinavia, sometime in the 9th century. The Grendel was a brawler Yautja, hulking in size and strength, and brazenly forgoing most of the usual armor hunters wear, preferring to face foes head-on, with a penchant for brutal hand-to-hand combat. “Hand-to-hand” is a relative term in this case, as the Grendel had the distinctive trait of a prosthetic right arm, fitted with a deadly sonic device, able to blast opponents with deafening concussive force. While most Yautja were hunters at the core, the Grendel was a fighter, one who was always ready to throw hands, simply for the love of the game.
5. Oni Predator (Predator: Killer of Killers)
The Oni Predator was an elite ninja-style assassin and hunter of the Warlord’s Clan, who came to Earth to hunt in 17th-century, feudal-era Japan. The Oni is one of the freakiest Yautja we’ve seen in the franchise, able to move like a ghost, and so highly-skilled at combat that not even two of the best Shinobi of their generation (the ninja Kenji, and his warlord “brother” Kiyoshi) could take him on alone.
4. Njohrr (Predator: Badlands)
Dek and Kwei’s father wasn’t just a master hunter; he was a chieftain who started his own clan, borrowing customs from both the Jungle and Desert clan traditions, while also adding in his own strict customs, like cloaking devices being a rite of passage earned through a hunt. Njohrr was clearly uniquely tough and powerful, because it’s the only way to gain and hold power in a Yautja society. Implementing your own new laws and customs requires even stronger will and greater force, making Njohrr one of the most uniquely powerful figures in the Predator franchise.
3. Upgrade Predator (The Predator)
The Upgrade Predator was created to be a hunter and killer of other Yautja, which speaks to his power level and why the Fugitive Predator sought to arm humanity with advanced weaponry against him. Virtually every usual aspect of the Yautja’s weaponry, gear, and natural abilities is enhanced in the Upgrade Predator, and if Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) and his allies hadn’t managed to kill the beast with its own weapons, there might’ve been no way to take Upgrade out.
2. Dek (Predator: Badlands)
Dek was supposed to be a “runt” unworthy of his father Njorhrr’s Clan; instead, he did what no other Yautja before him had: surviving the “death planet” Genna and taking on the unkillable beast called the Kalisk, as well as an entire battalion of Weyland-Yutani synths. If those feats don’t mark Dek as one of the strongest Yautja ever, coming back and killing his father Njohrr in a duel certainly made the point. Best of all, Dek is a rare Yautja whose “power” came from evolving, growing, and accepting a way of life beyond the Yautja’s dogmatic doctrines of strength and survival of the fittest.
1. The Grendel King (Predator: Killer of Killers)
The Grendel King is the main boss of Predator: Killer of Killers, and the chieftain of the Warlord’s Clan. There’s simple reasoning for why the Grendel King tops this list: he’s one of the largest and most fearsome Yautja we’ve seen; he leads one of the fiercest (if not the fiercest) clans we’ve ever seen, and he seems to routinely have to prove his might in tournaments like the “Killer of Killers,” battling opponents from across the galaxy who previously killed Yautja hunters. As of writing this, the Grendel King has yet to be defeated. And we don’t know who could even do the job.
You can stream every Predator movie on Hulu-Disney+. Discuss your favorite Predator films with us on the ComicBook Forum!
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