The breakout success of Prey on streaming gave Disney and 20th Century Studios the confidence to return the franchise to theaters with Predator: Badlands, even after several recent entries struggled at the box office.
The $100 million production has already cleared $150 million globally after just two full weeks in release, a promising turnaround for the long-running sci-fi series that began with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 classic.
With $76 million grossed to date, Badlands has become the highest-grossing film in the Predator franchise domestically (unadjusted for inflation).
Based on its current performance and past trends, industry analysts are predicting a final box office tally of $180 million to $200 million.
While the film is unlikely to recoup its production and marketing costs from theatrical ticket sales alone when accounting for revenue split with theater chains, in this new age of movie box office math, streaming rights, eventual digital rental and purchases along with merchandising will likely put the film in the green, eventually.
On the film, director Dan Trachtenberg previously stated, "Dek is a monster, and he behaves as ferociously as you’d expect. Dimitrius gives a performance that’s incredibly powerful and intimidating, but taps into subtle vulnerabilities to draw the audience in. Dek is part of a [pantheon] of characters who are antiheroes, who are rogues, and yet you still pull for them to do the right thing."
"20th Century Studios’ Predator: Badlands tells the story of Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young Predator exiled from his clan. In a quest to prove his worth, he travels to the deadliest planet in the galaxy to hunt an unkillable creature, the Kalisk."
"There, he finds an unlikely ally in a severed and stranded robot named Thia (Elle Fanning). Predator: Badlands is directed and produced by Dan Trachtenberg, a two-time Emmy® Award nominee for Prey (2022) who also directed the animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers (2025), both of which premiered exclusively on Hulu."
"Predator: Badlands is the first movie in the Predator Universe that centers on the species known as the Yautja — and it’s also the first in the franchise to make the Predator both a protagonist and an underdog."