The Predator movie franchise is jam packed with kills. Typically, it’s the titular Predators hunting down and killing a human. But we also see human on human action just as we see Predators (aka Yautja) taking down Earth’s wildlife. In fact, there have been a few instances of us seeing humans taking down the wildlife of the Yautja world. So, for this list, we got specific. This is relegated to how many people die on-screen. Meaning when we find Hopper and his men towards the beginning of the original Predator, those deaths didn’t count. They’re dead on-screen, but they didn’t die on-screen.
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However, it doesn’t matter who does the killing. So when Naru killed a few French trappers in Prey, they made the tally, as did the guerillas killed by Dutch and his men in Predator. Where will Predator: Badlands rank? Considering its protagonists are a Yautja and a synthetic woman, and the central plot seems to revolve around a Yautja getting revenge on other Yautja, it’s likely that it’ll rank fairly low. Without further ado, which Predator movie has the highest on-screen body count? Let’s find out.
8) Predators — 6 People
It may be the franchise’s most underrated sequel, but Predators does not come equipped with a ton of on-screen kills. Well, not in terms of people, anyway. A ton of the Yautja’s hunting hounds are met with flurries of bullets on-camera. There are also a few notable off-screen deaths. For instance, the unnamed man at the very beginning whose parachute doesn’t open and Danny Trejo’s Cuchillo, who we see disemboweled and serving as a trap to help ensnare the others.
This leaves the likes of Mahershala Ali’s Mombasa, who gets a spear to the back; Laurence Fishburne’s Roland, who receives a shoulder cannon blast; and Nikolai Fedorov, who blows himself apart after being cornered by the Tracker Predator in Roland’s now-compromised hideout. The other three to go are Walton Goggins’ Walter Stans, who has his spine ripped out; Louis Ozawa Changchien’s Hanzō Kawakami, who dies in a throwback to Billy’s one-on-one demise in the original film; and Topher Grace’s nefarious Dr. Edwin, who is blown up by Adrien Brody’s Royce.
7) AVP: Alien vs. Predator — 8 People
There’s plenty of loss-of-life in the utterly forgettable AVP: Alien vs. Predator, but most of it doesn’t qualify as on-screen loss of human life. Some human characters we just hear scream, others die via a Chestburster’s bursting just off-screen, others are just that type of thing in PG-13 movies where a very neat streak of blood flies up against a wall without us actually seeing a blade cut flesh. And then there’s one dude who died by frostbite back in 1904.
What we’re left with are eight people who die on-screen at the hands of either a Xenomorph or a Predator. Boris is thrown through a wall (which, yes, kills him), Mikkel is stabbed in the back, Sven is impaled against the wall by a spear, Bass and Max gets spears to the chest, Charles Weyland gets the wrist blades, we see a (fairly bloodless) chest burst, and Sanaa Lathan’s Lex Woods mercy kills Sebastian De Rosa.
6) Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem — 13 People
Effectively the nadir of both the Alien and Predator franchises, Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem is as broken as its word salad of a title might imply. The good news is that it does come with over a dozen on-screen kills. The bad news is you can see absolutely none of them.
Like with the film before it, most of the deaths in Requiem are Facehuggers, full-grown Xenomorphs, human deaths implied by off-screen screams, and people who were implanted with a Xenomorph embryo off-screen only to have it erupt from their chest also off-screen at which point we see their already-dead bodies. It’s not particularly exciting stuff. If we were to count off-screen deaths, this movie might very well win, though, considering it concludes with a nuke being dropped on a town.
5) Prey — 21 People
Dan Trachtenberg injected some much needed and very much unpredicted life into the Yautja franchise with Prey, an installment that’s more character-focused than everything that came before yet still came to the table with plenty of memorable on-screen departures. The recipient of that aforementioned focus is Naru, who gets quite a few kills under her belt in the film but leaves more than enough for the Yautja.
Amongst others, the Feral Predator shoots a dart in Wasape’s eye, decapitates Huupi, and obliterates a substantial number of unnamed French voyageurs (10 of whom we see it dispatch on-screen) with explosives and a sharp shield. The Feral Predator also uses its wrist blade on Raphael Adolini and Taabe, and decapitates Big Beard (who was already wounded by Naru).
4) Predator: Killer of Killers — 26 People
Dan Trachtenberg and Joshua Wassung’s excellent animated anthology, Predator: Killer of Killers, managed to beat Trachtenberg’s Yautja debut by five. And, of the 26 people who perish on-screen in the anthology, all of them are within the first three segments: “The Shield,” “The Sword,” and “The Bullet.”
Each of those segments has its fair share of highlight kills. In “The Shield,” there’s the Viking who gets tossed into the air like a ragdoll, at which point his skull is sandwiched by two wooden beams (not to mention the other Viking who gets his head punched off like the rooftop boxing scene in Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan). In “The Sword,” we learn the Yautja have Freddy-like finger-knives, which they use frequently. And, lastly, in “The Bullet,” there’s Vandy, who is decapitated after a whip device wraps around his plane, tightens, and tears it (and its pilot, of course) to shreds.
3) Predator 2 — 40 People
Predator 2 opens on a Los Angeles consumed by a gang war. In other words, a substantial number of the film’s 40 on-screen deaths aren’t at the hands of the Predator itself…but he still knocks off quite a few people.
Ironically, the film’s most memorable death is off-screen. Particularly the Yautja’s beheading of King Willie in a nighttime alleyway sequence (we do see the Yautja carrying away Willie’s head, but not the beheading itself). But that’s not the only particularly effective Yautja kill, as there’s also his slaughter of the OWLF agents, primarily with his spear and shoulder gun, but also with the bladed disc (on Gary Busey’s Peter Keyes).
2) The Predator — 49 People
The movie may be a mess, but The Predator does intermittently have fun action scenes (at least when they’re coherent, which isn’t always). And, unlike most of the other entries that preceded it on this list, The Predator actually shows most of its kills on-screen. The only real exceptions are the skinned victims we see towards the very beginning and a few unnamed guards midway through, when the Predator is escaping its laboratory captivity.
Like with most other entries in the franchise, this is also a case where the human characters get a lot of kills under the belts. Just as many, if not more so, than the Predator. Even still, the Predator goes through people in this movie, and with a wide variety of weapons, too. There’s the usual plasmacaster shoulder cannon kills as well as some usage of the shuriken, but the Predator also flat-out uses his long nails on a guy, which is apparently enough to kill him. The best kill of the movie doesn’t even belong to a Predator, though. It belongs to Boyd Holbrook’s Quinn McKenna, who shoots the man who abducted his son in the eye with a tranquilizer gun.
1) Predator — 77 People
The original Predator really does not seem like it would have the highest kill count of the franchise, but that’s exactly the case. It doesn’t feel that way because 95% of the film is the Predator hunting down and picking off Dutch’s group one-by-one.
But then there’s that guerilla camp raid in the first act. Dutch, Hawkins, Blain, Mac, Billy, and Poncho (along with Dillon, who brought them there under false pretenses) blast apart a whopping 72 guerillas. From there, the Yautja slices Hawkins with its wrist blades, blows a hole through Blain with his shoulder cannon, uses that same shoulder cannon on Mac’s head, impales Dillon after shooting off his arm, and shoots Poncho in the side of the head. And, while he wasn’t counted, he knocked off Billy too, then pulled his spine out.
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Image Credit: Marvel Comics
