Predator 5 announced - Why can't they leave this fucking franchise just rest in peace?

[RomanesEuntDomus]

You have to be fucking kidding me! This shit again? Another Predator movie after the disaster of the last one only confirms that Hollywood just wants to continue losing money because they don't have a clue and would rather double down than admit they made a mistake. These creatively bankrupt faggots can't stop ass raping the corpse of dead franchises because they are incapable to create new concepts, it is sickening.

How are they even going to call this one? Consider how utterly retarded the naming convention for this franchise became after 2.

Predator > Predator 2 > Predators > The Predator > ???

I assume it will have some really fucking awkward title, like "Predator: Call of the Wild". Something to go with the noble savage bullshit they are peddling.

Funniest thing is that they hired an actress that is a mix of thai, spanish and sioux heritage in the role of a comanche. Not only does she not look the part (white passing privilege much?), but you know all the producers cared about was to cast someone of vague redskin heritage, cause sioux, comanche, it's all the same to them.
Cause nothing says "celebrating the diversity of native american culture" as much as treating it as interchangeable.

 

[BrunoMattei]

It's funny how there's more than one of these sci fi franchises of the 70s, 80s and 90s that should have quit with movie number two.

Namely Alien, The Terminator and Predator, all great movies with great sequels (well Predator 2 is not on the level of Aliens and Terminator 2 but it's still solid) but none of them have managed another movie to really be worth it beyond the first sequel.

Why was the 80s/early 90s such a highly creative time for movies and why was there such a steep decline since?

I love Alien 3! Fucker.

How are they even going to call this one? Consider how utterly retarded the naming convention for this franchise became after 2.

Predator > Predator 2 > Predators > The Predator > ???

Next movie is called A Predator.

 

[Dom Cruise]

I would assume that making movies was much more open to outsiders, so you'd get inspired creative people flooding Hollywood with their ideas. Special effects became more refined and allowed more cool stuff at lower costs and companies in general seemed to be willing to take some risks.

Then the writer's strike happened and the culture in Hollywood became even more nepotistic and cronyistic than it was before. Now, you have trust fund kids that kiss up to the correct people ending up in major positions of power and companies that would rather slit their own throat than to take a risk, so they meddle with any movie they finance, give no liberties to people with a vision and what we get is corporate approved, focus-group-tested gargabe that tries to appeal to everyone, while really not appealing to anyone.

Also, this thread is kind of magical.
When it got bumped the last time, I was thinking it was a new thread cause I could not remember reading about this project before and then was totally surprised when I figured out I had made this thread myself.
Even the spectacle of these shitty projects being announced and a franchise getting buttfucked by politics has become such an everyday occurance, it's not even leaving any imprint on my mind when I make a thread about it myself.

That's how indifferent I have become to the meanderings of hypocritical assholes in Hollywood.

There's a lot of different reasons why there was such a high level of creativity versus later on.

One big factor is simply the rise of CGI, it made special effects too easy, suddenly anything a filmmaker can imagine, they can show, but creativity is born from restrictions, being able to just do anything ironically made it more boring because now there's less focus on story and character, there's less of a need to actually make a good movie when you can slap endless CG spectacle on everything, the Michael Bay Transformers movies are perfect examples of this, but so is James Cameron's Avatar, Cameron didn't have to think the story and character through too much because he able to build this entire alien world from scratch, the polar opposite of The Terminator where Cameron had to be very innovative and creative to work within the confines of a much smaller budget and consequently The Terminator is a much better movie.

The second factor is just simply a good old fashioned lack of creativity, with a movie like The Predator, Hollywood wants it to be a more typical sci fi franchise, the trouble is Predator isn't that, it's a movie with a very specific premise, "what if an alien hunter hunted humans like prey?" and the first movie pretty much did everything you could really do with that premise, 2 did a little more but then you're pretty much done, it becomes "been there done that" which is exactly why I thought Predators was so boring.

I love Alien 3! Fucker.

To be fair, Alien 3 comes the closest out of all these movies because it was at least trying to do something significantly different, but it's still just not nearly as good as Alien and Aliens.

 

[That Chris Guy]

You have to be fucking kidding me! This shit again? Another Predator movie after the disaster of the last one only confirms that Hollywood just wants to continue losing money because they don't have a clue and would rather double down than admit they made a mistake. These creatively bankrupt faggots can't stop ass raping the corpse of dead franchises because they are incapable to create new concepts, it is sickening.

How are they even going to call this one? Consider how utterly retarded the naming convention for this franchise became after 2.

Predator > Predator 2 > Predators > The Predator > ???

Ironically, that list also ranks the movies from best to worst.

Let's face it - It's going to be terrible, and Disney isn't competent enough to make it halfway decent. I can't wait until the Predator's relegated to floundering around in a web of comical traps that set each other off successively like a Home Alone scene.

I love Alien 3! Fucker.

It was a decent movie, but like Dawn of Fate it would have benefitted from not killing part of the main cast in the first 5 minutes and rendering major parts of the previous films (Ripley saving Newt) utterly pointless.

 

[BrunoMattei]

It was a decent movie, but like Dawn of Fate it would have benefitted from not killing part of the main cast in the first 5 minutes and rendering major parts of the previous films (Ripley saving Newt) utterly pointless.

It wasn't utterly pointless. Ripley faced her PTSD and spared Newt a horrible death. Your argument could be applied to almost every zombie movie ever made.

PWNED.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

One big factor is simply the rise of CGI, it made special effects too easy, suddenly anything a filmmaker can imagine, they can show, but creativity is born from restrictions, being able to just do anything ironically made it more boring because now there's less focus on story and character, there's less of a need to actually make a good movie when you can slap endless CG spectacle on everything, the Michael Bay Transformers movies are perfect examples of this, but so is James Cameron's Avatar, Cameron didn't have to think the story and character through too much because he able to build this entire alien world from scratch, the polar opposite of The Terminator where Cameron had to be very innovative and creative to work within the confines of a much smaller budget and consequently The Terminator is a much better movie.

The second factor is just simply a good old fashioned lack of creativity, with a movie like The Predator, Hollywood wants it to be a more typical sci fi franchise, the trouble is Predator isn't that, it's a movie with a very specific premise, "what if an alien hunter hunted humans like prey?" and the first movie pretty much did everything you could really do with that premise, 2 did a little more but then you're pretty much done, it becomes "been there done that" which is exactly why I thought Predators was so boring.

The availability and cheap nature of new CGI effects, that allow for spectacle to distract from story and characters, is something that I seriously underestimated but it all now falls into place.

The big movies by Cameron, Emmerich and Bay were always praised for their special effects but the plots were always really boring old and generic things that one has "seen a hundred times before", literally.
To this day I refuse to waste my time on 2012 and Avatar, when every word of praise I ever heard about those movies was about how great the effects looked. If I want to see great effects, I can just watch a techdemo and 30 second clips, I don't need to waste my time with generic Emmerich characters, destruction porn or Smurfs-meets-dances-with-wolves.

Another aspect that's directly linked to the terrible, terrible sequels to established IPs that needs to be mentioned:
The economic crash of 2008.

Production companies became really averse to risk, so they didn't want to make something new (that would be marketed in a way to introduce and intrigue viewers), they wanted stuff to be marketable on established reputation, hence a multitude of bad sequels, remakes, reboots and re-imaginings were made. The market never truly healed from that and it's no surprise that the biggest brand in cinema history is Marvel: it uses established lore, established characters, established plots, throws them in a mixer and delivers pretty solid popcorn cinema. And it did so, right around the time when being a nerd became fashionable, so going to a superhero comicbook movie wasn't frowned upon the same way it was a decade earlier.

Now here we are, with production companies taking away all the wrong lessons for what to do in the future. Namely this silly concept of an expanded universe with a million tie-ins. Sure, it's great for cross marketing products, but they should really focus on making a good movie (a good product) first and then worry about marketing other products.
Much like videogames that do their best to look great in screenshots and fail to really deliver on anything else (you can't print a screenshot of a good plot), movies want to look good for the trailers and be marketable on a big IP name.

Add to that the nepotism and political inbreeding with a pinch of cancel culture and fart-sniffing and you get a recipe for desaster.
Thankfully, I can still just go to the store, buy the iconic movies of the past and enjoy them at my leisure and I'd rather watch Back to the Future a hundredth time or rewatch an entire re-run of Schwarzeneggers iconic movies before I have to spend even a single fucking cent on thet crap Hollywood wants me to buy.

It becomes especially annoying when Hollywood expects me to pay for their political indoctrination, that just so happens to rape one of my favorite action movies of all time.

Dear Hollywood elites:
Call me a misogynist nazi for the millionth time for not watching Ghostbusters 2016. I bet it will make me watch your self-indulgent, hypocritical, badly made crap eventually.

It was a decent movie, but like Dawn of Fate it would have benefitted from not killing part of the main cast in the first 5 minutes and rendering major parts of the previous films (Ripley saving Newt) utterly pointless.

Absolutely. Alien 3 commits the same cardinal sin that the SW Sequel trilogy commits: It is entirely disjointed from the old movies and makes them completely pointless. Granted, the Shitsquels took a dump on absolutely every aspect of an entire trilogy, whereas Alien 3 merely invalidates all tension about saving Newt and Higgs and failed to deliver a good follow-up on those movies, but still. The general issue is the same.

Alien 3 throws the entire ending of Aliens under the bus (and pretty much the majority of that movie while it's at it), feels like someone just took a script entirely unrelated from the Alien IP, scribbled down a few notes about Newt and Higgs dying, changing some names and then using it for an Alien 3.
And all this could be forgiven, if it was a better movie, but it isn't in the opinions of the majority of Alien fans. Sadly, it could be a decent movie, if it was its own thing, I think. But when you stumble into a movie that just invalidates the previous installment, that seriously lowers any enjoyment you could get from that movie.

Alien 3 wasn't well received at any time for this reason. You can still enjoy it, if you don't care about how it ties in with Aliens or if you can convince yourself that it doesn't invalidate Aliens by coming up with a flimsy argument about PTSD, but that's a subjective thing (granted, much like not liking the movie is a subjective thing, too, but it's clearly the consensus amongst fans).
I, for one, dislike Alien 3 for what it does to Aliens and it's simply not a good enough movie to overlook that major shortcoming.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Alien 3 killing off Newt and Hicks is unforgivable, one of the worst creative decisions in the history of media, I've heard people use the excuse that because it's horror, it's ok to kill off these characters, it's not, because it does so in a way that makes zero sense, how was there an egg on the ship when the queen didn't have her egg sac and was killed long before she would have had time to do anything else? It makes zero sense and craters the entire thing.

But I don't think the fact that it's horror is an excuse either, bad storytelling is bad storytelling, undoing the entire plot of your previous movie is simply bad storytelling, that's all there is to it.

To make matters worse Alien 3 doesn't give us anything in it's place to justify what it took away, we go from the amazing sci fi sets of the first two movies to... a bunch of bald British dudes running around an old abandoned factory, yippee.

Where's the sci fi? One of the original scripts purposely avoided sci fi by having be set in a monastery with monks avoiding technology for Religious reasons, that's cool and at least makes sense, what doesn't make sense is what's supposed to be a space colony having nothing in the way of futuristic technology.

The nicest thing I will say about Alien 3 is it does have a great cast of actors, taken outside of context the grimy early 90s feel is interesting in it's own way (you can tell Fincher had a background in music videos) and I can respect that it at least tried to do something bold and shocking, it just failed miserably at it.

It says it all that the only piece of Alien media we got since Aliens that was on the level of the first two movies is Alien: Isolation... which took place before Aliens, side stepping the issue of Alien 3 entirely.

I'm just glad I never bothered to watch Alien 3 in it's entirety as a kid, I loved Alien and Aliens, I caught part of Alien 3 on TV once and could right away tell it sucked even not knowing that Newt and Hicks were supposed to be dead, I didn't learn that until years later and I'm glad because I would have been so heart broken.

What's funny is Terminator 3 did something similar, it just waited until the end of the movie instead of the beginning, but it too undoes the entire point of the second movie, it just does so in a way that feels cool when you first see the movie, because hey, it's unexpected, but when you go back and think about it you realize how shitty it is to undo the second movie like that.

Everything else in Terminator 3 is just a rehash of stuff we saw in 2, creating a very "been there, done that" feel, I don't even hate Terminator 3 that much, but I do not at all consider it to be actual "canon" much like I consider Alien canon to have ended after Aliens.

I don't want this post to go on for too long, but I do want to mention that the only way forward for movies is to get off the nostalgia teat, I love Alien, Terminator, Predator, Star Wars etc as much as the next guy, but it's time for us to create all new sci fi stories, just use the classics for inspiration, we dishonor them by tarnishing their legacies with crappy sequels instead of just letting them be.

You have to remember what those filmmakers did, they themselves were using older movies for inspiration, just updating them into something all new, but we as a culture stopped doing that, instead of going forward we only want to keep looking backwards, imagine how great another wave of movies we could have gotten had filmmakers used the 70s/80s for inspiration instead of just rehashing them.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

Alien 3 killing off Newt and Hicks is unforgivable, one of the worst creative decisions in the history of media, I've heard people use the excuse that because it's horror, it's ok to kill off these characters, it's not, because it does so in a way that makes zero sense, how was there an egg on the ship when the queen didn't have her egg sac and was killed long before she would have had time to do anything else? It makes zero sense and craters the entire thing.

But I don't think the fact that it's horror is an excuse either, bad storytelling is bad storytelling, undoing the entire plot of your previous movie is simply bad storytelling, that's all there is to it.

To make matters worse Alien 3 doesn't give us anything in it's place to justify what it took away, we go from the amazing sci fi sets of the first two movies to... a bunch of bald British dudes running around an old abandoned factory, yippee.

Where's the sci fi? One of the original scripts purposely avoided sci fi by having be set in a monastery with monks avoiding technology for Religious reasons, that's cool and at least makes sense, what doesn't make sense is what's supposed to be a space colony having nothing in the way of futuristic technology.

The nicest thing I will say about Alien 3 is it does have a great cast of actors, taken outside of context the grimy early 90s feel is interesting in it's own way (you can tell Fincher had a background in music videos) and I can respect that it at least tried to do something bold and shocking, it just failed miserably at it.

It says it all that the only piece of Alien media we got since Aliens that was on the level of the first two movies is Alien: Isolation... which took place before Aliens, side stepping the issue of Alien 3 entirely.

I'm just glad I never bothered to watch Alien 3 in it's entirety as a kid, I loved Alien and Aliens, I caught part of Alien 3 on TV once and could right away tell it sucked even not knowing that Newt and Hicks were supposed to be dead, I didn't learn that until years later and I'm glad because I would have been so heart broken.

What's funny is Terminator 3 did something similar, it just waited until the end of the movie instead of the beginning, but it too undoes the entire point of the second movie, it just does so in a way that feels cool when you first see the movie, because hey, it's unexpected, but when you go back and think about it you realize how shitty it is to undo the second movie like that.

Everything else in Terminator 3 is just a rehash of stuff we saw in 2, creating a very "been there, done that" feel, I don't even hate Terminator 3 that much, but I do not at all consider it to be actual "canon" much like I consider Alien canon to have ended after Aliens.

I don't want this post to go on for too long, but I do want to mention that the only way forward for movies is to get off the nostalgia teat, I love Alien, Terminator, Predator, Star Wars etc as much as the next guy, but it's time for us to create all new sci fi stories, just use the classics for inspiration, we dishonor them by tarnishing their legacies with crappy sequels instead of just letting them be.

You have to remember what those filmmakers did, they themselves were using older movies for inspiration, just updating them into something all new, but we as a culture stopped doing that, instead of going forward we only want to keep looking backwards, imagine how great another wave of movies we could have gotten had filmmakers used the 70s/80s for inspiration instead of just rehashing them.

Alien 3 is definitely a better film in Assembly Cut form, and given the utter chaos behind it's production I'm surprised we got anything remotely watchable. It's certainly not perfect, I've watched it multiple times and still couldn't tell you most of the character's names, since as you say it's hard to differentiate bald British guy in rags #12 from the rest. But I'd call it a flawed diamond and far better than Resurrection.

Just mentioned this in the other thread, but The Predator was so terrible it must have been deliberate. The whole thing was a nonsensical mess (so the Predator came to Earth to save us, but wakes up and starts killing everyone? Autism lets you read alien writing?) and the way both the predator and main baddie die makes me think it has to be Shane Black trolling us. The reshot ending was awful, but after seeing the leaked original I think that would have been even worse.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Alien 3 is definitely a better film in Assembly Cut form, and given the utter chaos behind it's production I'm surprised we got anything remotely watchable. It's certainly not perfect, I've watched it multiple times and still couldn't tell you most of the character's names, since as you say it's hard to differentiate bald British guy in rags #12 from the rest. But I'd call it a flawed diamond and far better than Resurrection.

Just mentioned this in the other thread, but The Predator was so terrible it must have been deliberate. The whole thing was a nonsensical mess (so the Predator came to Earth to save us, but wakes up and starts killing everyone? Autism lets you read alien writing?) and the way both the predator and main baddie die makes me think it has to be Shane Black trolling us. The reshot ending was awful, but after seeing the leaked original I think that would have been even worse.

The Assembly Cut is the only version I've seen and I still hated it, I shutter to think what the theatrical version must be like if the Assembly Cut is "better"

I never bothered with Resurrection, it really disappoints me though because how could an Alien movie directed by Jean Paul Jeunet and starring Brad Dourif and Ron Perlman be bad? I've never managed to work up the courage to watch it because I don't want to simply confirm it sucks and it's a moot point anyway because if it follows Alien 3, then it ain't canon in my eyes.

It's a shame though because with Predator and Terminator you can say that there wasn't really much more for the stories to go, but Alien definitely had a ton of potential for more after Aliens, but they dropped the ball hard.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

Now with 100% more autism.

 

[Truthboi]

Now with 100% more autism.

I hope the new one doubles down on how the predators want autism

 

[Product Placement]

Disney got to milk the Fox ips they can, they have already started on the kids ips like Home Alone, now they have Disney+ Star in the rest of the world for more adult stuff, I expect them to start milking the rest of Fox ips. So this and the Alien tv show are just the start of the milking, I fully expect movies/tv shows and made for streaming movies of 28 Days Later, Die Hard and The Fly within the next few years.

 

[That Chris Guy]

It wasn't utterly pointless. Ripley faced her PTSD and spared Newt a horrible death. Your argument could be applied to almost every zombie movie ever made.

PWNED.

Whether horrible or not, she still died. The goal was never about merciful euthanasia - it was to save her life, and that goal failed. Had Ripley not intervened, Newt would have died from the thermonuclear explosion before the alien had grown enough to exit her.

You can still enjoy the movie and simultaneously understand why people hated it. At least Alien 3 never made Newt out to be the future saviour of mankind.

 

[verissimus]

I hope the new one doubles down on how the predators want autism

Well it's going to double down on the identity politics : https://boundingintocomics.com/2021...the-gender-norms-and-traditions-of-her-tribe/

 

[Truthboi]

Well it's going to double down on the identity politics : https://boundingintocomics.com/2021...the-gender-norms-and-traditions-of-her-tribe/

Man that sucks, it would've been way funnier if it was into the super-autism instead

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Well it's going to double down on the identity politics : https://boundingintocomics.com/2021...the-gender-norms-and-traditions-of-her-tribe/

Frankly, we should push the idea that this movie is super-duper-problematic for insinuating that Indian tribes were misogynistic and implying that they needed white people to lecture them on equality. I have a hunch it could work.

Also lol, the article contains an image that's very exploitable to describe the state of the Predator IP:

 

[That Chris Guy]

I never bothered with Resurrection, it really disappoints me though because how could an Alien movie directed by Jean Paul Jeunet and starring Brad Dourif and Ron Perlman be bad? I've never managed to work up the courage to watch it because I don't want to simply confirm it sucks and it's a moot point anyway because if it follows Alien 3, then it ain't canon in my eyes.

I like to think of it as Jurassic Park in Alien form. There was some potential in its premise, but ultimately I wasn't satisfied with Ripley being who she was. You might think, "cool, so powerful now. Edgy!", but making her into this odd hybrid took away part of the character as far as I'm concerned.

Midthunder’s character is described by the entertainment news source as “a Comanche woman who goes against the gender norms and traditions of her tribe to become a warrior.”

It should really be, " a Comanche woman who goes against the gender norms and traditions of her tribe to end up as a skeletal trophy on the Predator's wall".

That would at least help the movie.

 

[Pinochet Was Right]

They brainstormed so many retarded ideas for Alien 3, pretty much ALL OF THE ABORTED SCRIPTS hinge on "aliens being on the ship while Ripley and the others are asleep". The final film we got was just a mishmash of ideas mixed with the previous aborted "wooden space station" script which was made by some pretentious art fag douche who was using the Alien brand as a vehicle for his "epic vishun"
I mean, it took me 5 minutes to come up with this concept:

"The movie takes place some months after Aliens, after returning home Newt was sent to Earth with relatives (the first unused script had this as her fate), Hicks was discharged, Bishop decommissioned and Ripley "billed" by the Company: she ends up in prison as one of the inmates. Months later the Company goes back to LV-426 since they had the coordinates for the derelict ship ever since Ripley was debriefed at the start of Aliens, they salvage the last surviving eggs and drop them on the prison planet to kill two birds with one stone: breed the aliens and get rid of the undesirables. Ripley takes charge and still ends up sacrificing herself at the end."

Boom, there you have it. I came up with this when I was 20, while a bunch of old geezers from the industry couldn't.

Anyways, I like the film we got as a horror film, and at least the Assembly Cut's focus on the prison and the inmates gives you a reason to stop thinking about the previous cast getting fridged and pay attention to the film. The theatrical cut is unforgivable, you don't even get to see who the hell the inmates are and they keep vanishing from one scene to the other.

 

[The Valeyard]

Frankly, we should push the idea that this movie is super-duper-problematic for insinuating that Indian tribes were misogynistic and implying that they needed white people to lecture them on equality. I have a hunch it could work.

You can also add in that the movie treats Native American cultures as being interchangeable in the casting of someone with a Sioux background to play a Comanche, as you pointed out earlier in the thread.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

"The movie takes place some months after Aliens, after returning home Newt was sent to Earth with relatives (the first unused script had this as her fate), Hicks was discharged, Bishop decommissioned and Ripley "billed" by the Company: she ends up in prison as one of the inmates. Months later the Company goes back to LV-426 since they had the coordinates for the derelict ship ever since Ripley was debriefed at the start of Aliens, they salvage the last surviving eggs and drop them on the prison planet to kill two birds with one stone: breed the aliens and get rid of the undesirables. Ripley takes charge and still ends up sacrificing herself at the end."

I like that idea and it feels way more organic, too. You could have Hicks and a few mercenaries drop into the movie in the second act to safe Ripley.

Maybe it's just me, but looking at the movies Alien and Aliens, I would not have minded if the focus would have shifted some more.
In Alien, it's a group of blue collar workers trying to survive the attack of an unknown organism.
In Aliens, you have a bunch of soldiers fighting to survive against an attack of a somewhat known organism. And then there's the subplot of Earth wanting to weaponize the xenomorph.
Alien 3 could deal with xenomorphs being weaponized like what you described, but wouldn't it be also interesting if the Prometheans showed up and started to fuck with humanity, using xenomorphs to devastate entire planets? The fight against an unknown, unstoppable alien force could be made to fit the narrative of the first two movies quite neatly.
Not saying it's the best idea ever, but I think it could be an interesting evolution of the franchise.

Meanwhile, following the adventures of REE the Comanche Chick on her quest for equal pay and abortion rights won't be deemed a worthy evolution of the Predator franchise... or rather... what's left of it.