‘The Predator’ Reshoots Reportedly Change Climax and Ending

Shane Black’s sequel film The Predator has kept fans of the franchise confused ever since it was first announced. From how the film fits into the franchise, to what story it will tell, there’s been more rumor than official info about this project. Even reports of the trailer dropping turned out to be wrong.

Well, in a recent interview with CinemaBlend, one of the stars of The Predator, Keegan-Michael Key, revealed just how extensive the recent reshoots to the film were – and it sounds extensive, indeed:

“We just finished [reshoots] last week, and just about three-quarters of the third act was rewritten. And Shane Black is… he’s just a consummate professional, and a consummate writer. He’s a wordsmith! It was a really, really exhilarating experience, and I think that he’s still one of our most vibrant writers of cinema.”

That sounds like a pretty big recut – one that will no doubt concern fans, as it’s keeping with a tradition that hasn’t always worked out well in recent years. World War Z was a big horror action/horror film that had to reconfigure its entire third act late in the game, as did Rogue One and Justice League. The results may have been passable, but the major changes left a lot of viewers feeling like they got a disjointed “Frankenstein” film experience, which lacked the narrative cohesiveness you need in a movie.

Of course, that’s not to say that Shane Black couldn’t pull something great off with this version of The Predator – it’s just that between the storyline we know, the lack of promotional materials, and now work of extensive changes, hope is not exactly riding high on this one. A trailer could definitely change that perception – we just need Black to drop it.

Here’s what we know about The Predator, so far: The film is set thirty years after the original film, and follows a storyline that was described as such by one of the movie’s stars, Punisher actor Thomas Jane:

“We play these veterans from like Afghanistan, Iraq war or whatever. But we’re all f—ing crazy so we go to the VA hospital to get our meds… we’re in group therapy and of course, somebody flips out… and we all get arrested and get thrown onto the bus to go down to the hospital and they throw this other guy on the bus too… And he’s a guy they’ve actually marked to kill him because he’s seen a UFO, he’s seen the Predator ships come down so they lock him up and throw him in with us lunatics…They’re going to take that bus, drive it down to a ditch and shoot us all just to get rid of this one guy.

But, of course, we take the bus over and we’re all like ‘f–k that man, let’s go kill these f–king Predators ourselves’ and we’re just crazy enough to believe that this guy really did see a UFO and there’s these aliens out there.“

That search takes this unlikely group into the heart of suburbia, where they reportedly encounter locals like Key’s character. How this all will synch with a Predator story is something that remains to be seen. The cast includes Boyd Holbrook (Logan), Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight), and Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones) as elite military types hunting the Predator; Sterling K. Brown (This Is Us), and Olivia Munn (X-Men: Apocalypse) as government and scientist types (respectively) investigating the Predator race; a young autistic boy (Jacob Tremblay) who is a language prodigy; the boy’s mother (Yvonne Strahovski); and some assorted supporting characters (Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane).

The Predator will be in theaters on September 14th.