Prey Secretly Used Footage From Another Movie, Here’s Why

Prey has a surprise hidden in its footage. The new Predator movie was filmed primarily in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and shot on the Stoney Nakoda First Nation lands (doubling for the Comanche Nation). After filming was over however, director Dan Trachtenberg realized a problem that they had, they needed extra footage that they hadn’t shot. Luckily for him, Prey‘s visual effects supervisor Ryan Cook had a solution, extra footage from another movie that they could sneak in. That’s right, in Prey there are two shots in the movie however that don’t belong to the movie, at least not originally. You’d never know it, especially since some VFX have been added to make them fit into Prey, but for about ten seconds when you’re watching Prey you’re actually watching footage from 2020’s Call of the Wild remake.

While watching Prey, be it on Hulu or when it arrives on 4K next month, you would never notice that for a few seconds it uses two shots originally meant for 2020’s The Call of the Wild, but they’re there. After Amber Midthunder’s Naru escapes the Predator, fresh from killing a bear, she swims away in the river at about the 45:22 mark in the film, and for the next two shots of this movie the footage actually comes from The Call of the Wild (with Midthunder’s character added with VFX). 

The revelation for this footage comes via Dan Trachtenberg’s commentary for the home media release of Prey. When the sequence begins to play out in the film, Amber Midthunder says on the commentary “That water was so cold,” only for Trachtenberg to add, “That’s not you. That’s not even our movie.” ComicBook.com spoke with Trachtenberg for the upcoming release of the film on home media, and naturally, we had to ask about it. As for how it came to be, it was like we said, simply a matter of production being over and realizing that they still needed a few pieces. You can see one of the shots below.

“Yeah, literally, we need those things. We need to transition,” Trachtenberg revealed about The Call of the Wild footage in Prey. “We only got a little bit, we needed more and Call of the Wild is a 20th Century movie. And I remembered hearing on commentary for Blade Runner that the end of Blade Runner that has Decker driving off into the countryside was because Kubrick let him use the extra footage from The Shining, That already was like, ‘Oh, that’s the thing we can do.’ And our effects supervisor worked on Call of the Wild and he shot second unit, shot the drone footage and was aware of it.”

Prey using footage from another movie isn’t unheard of in Hollywood, in fact plenty of high profile movies have done it in the past. Blade Runner as Trachtenberg said is one notable example, but in Raiders of the Lost Ark Steven Spielberg used footage from Lost Horizon to complete the movie. Classic Disney cartoons would reuse animatics with some frequency too, with Robin Hood re-using animation from Jungle Book, Snow White, and more. In short, Prey is in good company.

Prey is available now on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD October 3, with over two hours of all-new bonus features.