Prey

Prey is directed by 10 Cloverfield Lane's Dan Trachtenberg and stars Amber Midthunder, Dane DiLiegro, Michelle Thrush, and Dakota Beavers. Speaking to Total ...

Here’s what you need to know… Where can I watch the rest of the Predator films? But where can you watch Prey and the rest of the Predator films?

Hulu's clever prequel to 'Predator' is so much more than IP exploitation—it's bloodthirsty, self-assured, and crowd-pleasing.

What’s at stake in Naru’s adventure isn’t just survival, it’s an identity, and the subtle hints that the Predator here is also a bit of a rookie—and maybe Naru’s mirror image—work nicely without overwhelming the slender story line. Ultimately, it’s that very leanness—a stripped-down, muscular propulsiveness—that differentiates and elevates Trachtenberg’s proudly middleweight films above avatars of midsummer bloat like The Gray Man. Prey isn’t striving for greatness, or even really for posterity; instead, it’s happy to be tight and self-contained. Every person on-screen who isn’t Naru is pretty much grist for the mill, and the way the Predator’s presence gets weaponized against a group of cartoonishly nasty French interlopers is more righteous than suspenseful or frightening (just as it was in Predator 2, whose real bad guys worked for the DEA). At this point, it’s hard to make a figure as familiar as the Predator genuinely scary for audiences who’ve grown up with the iconography. In a nice touch, Prey complicates the theme of predation by juxtaposing the alien’s advanced weaponry with the steel traps and shell casings littering the woods—the detritus of European settlers. An image of fields littered with slaughtered, skinned buffalo is genuinely nightmarish, and keeps the period-piece setting from feeling like a gimmick. In lieu of characters with superpowers, Trachtenberg likes heroes who punch up; he’s said that he wanted Prey to convey the same basic, elemental appeal of Predator, which he defined, quite aptly, as “the ingenuity of a human being who won’t give up.” Or, as Jesse “the Body” Ventura put it so succinctly: “Ain’t got time to bleed.” The satisfaction of McTiernan’s film lay in making a front-runner into an underdog, and then giving him the duke anyway. The film makes a fun running gag out of the idea that there’s a food chain extending both ways through the animal, human, and extra-terrestrial worlds. There’s some other interesting backstory here as well: At first, Prey was conceived as a bit of stealth brand extension that would disguise its own status as intellectual property, the industry equivalent of the Predator’s own cloaking device. “We made it to be a big theatrical experience and on the downside, it’s not being released that way,” Trachtenberg told Screenrant, sounding like a filmmaker trying to put on a happy face. Its cast is dominated by Native American and First Nations actors, and while the version I watched featured English and Comanche dialogue, it’s also being released in a full Comanche-language dub—the first U.S. film to ever hold that distinction. As industry power brokers debate whether even summer movies belong on the big screen—and even $90 million superhero movies are canceled as tax breaks—Prey is in a highly visible yet precarious position.

Amber Midthunder stars in Prey, a standalone prequel to the 1987 classic Predator, as “Naru,” a First Nations hunter who faces off with a Predator invader.

They started in the back of the room and moved stealthily through until they got all the way to the front towards me. “We created with Kevin a Native tactical sign language,” explains Myers. “Even in their off time [the cast] would go down the river and use it to talk to each other. In the middle of the conversation, the entire tribe shot up and had bows and arrows pointed at me. “I walked over after the first take and said, ‘Maybe do a little shh.’ We do a take and it was awesome. I turned to the DP [director of photography] next to me and I was like, ‘This feels familiar. In the middle of Prey, a “mud pit sequence” mirrors another scene from Predator which Trachtenberg says was an unintentional parallel. “We created a sign language,” Midthunder says. “That's what links them, on top of the obvious things we sought after to include in the movie.” Producer Jhane Myers, a Comanche and Blackfeet American film and TV producer, says the production worked with Kevin Starblanket, a First Nations individual with a background in military, law enforcement, and survival tactics. We had it on a hard drive and dissected certain points and took a lot of inspiration from it.” Naru is eager to prove her worth as a hunter for her village despite the sexist assumption that a young woman can’t assume such a role in her community. Naru is a total badass in her own right as she studies the Predator’s advanced tools and uses them to fight back against her adversary.

Native American actress Amber Midthunder on tomahawk skills, Indigenous representation, her breakout role in 'Prey' and which film changed her life.

Midthunder “really enjoyed that experience” and hopes to do more in the future. She and director Dan Trachtenberg figured out a trick by tying a rope to it (so Naru can throw the axe, pull it back quickly and then toss it again) and from there “it was just honestly a lot of experimenting,” she says. “How many times can you throw it up in the air and twist it? “Prey” filmed on Stoney Nakoda land near Calgary, with a primarily Native American and First Nation cast, and placed a spotlight on Comanche lifestyle and history. A bear attack on Naru meant performing with a stuntman in “a not particularly great bear suit,” Midthunder says. “I always have intentions in that realm of things when I'm working, but they're not necessarily everybody's focus.”

The Predator series goes back in time and back to its roots for an old-fashioned monster hunt in the gripping Prey.

Prey is a modest sci-fi action thriller, a return as we said in many ways to the series’ simple roots, and largely successful on its own terms as a result. While the film is in English with a few Comanche words here and there, the young actors make no attempt at all to sound like humans from an earlier era; much of the dialogue is delivered as if they’re twentysomethings living in 2022 who are doing some cosplay in the woods. There’s been some grumbling among fans about the fact that 20th Century Studios (a subsidiary of Disney) has chosen to premiere this film on Hulu rather than as a theatrical release like every previous Predator movie. For one thing, Prey takes the franchise back to nature, in this case a forest and plains, which is where it belongs. Prey is the fifth installment in the Predator franchise (and seventh if you count the two Alien vs. The protagonist is a young woman named Naru (Amber Midthunder), a highly proficient tracker and hunter who is nevertheless dismissed by the male members of her tribe, including her own brother (Dakota Beavers), especially when she warns that the threat they face is much more dangerous than a lion or other wild animal.

The deadly alien hunter returns in the best Predator movie since the original. It hit Hulu on Friday.

You can also watch with a Comanche dub and subtitles for full cultural immersion, but they weren't available on the prerelease version. Instead, Naru is a clever, observant human being, and her occasionally tense relationships with her brother and other fellow Comanche Nation tribespeople give the movie emotional resonance. However, the final battle is drenched in the shadow of night, making it hard to discern what's happening as both predator and prey unleash an arsenal of gadgets.

Prey includes some fun links to previous Predator movies. 20th Century Studios. Predator prequel Prey -- that's fun to say out loud -- came to Hulu ...

Prey apparently overwrites the events of the 1996 comic Predator: 1718, in which one of the aliens teams up with a pirate captain to battle his mutinous crew. After the human triumphs, a bunch of other Predators decloak and seem ready to murder him. The final image pans to show a Predator ship coming out of storm clouds over Naru's camp, implying that the aliens attacked again. It mirrors the sequence in which her brother Taabe ( Dakota Beavers) did so with the lion earlier in the movie, after she failed to. Having seen her fellow Comanche Nation warriors and the deeply unpleasant French poachers slaughtered by the Predator, Naru lures the beast into a trap in the dark forest. It pits one of the alien hunters against Comanche Nation tribespeople like Naru ( Amber Midthunder), and it's absolutely excellent.

As a movie villain, the Predator has pretty basic motivations. He's an alien who comes to Earth to hunt for fun with some cool gadgets.

She’s an anti-Arnold in the best way, the kind of heroine who knows she can be underestimated and uses that to her advantage. “This movie resets a whole lot of paradigms, and one of them is the language component,” Myers told ComicBook.com in an interview. No one—including her brother (Dakota Beavers)—believes her, so she heads out with her loyal pup Sarii (a Very Good Dog) to take down the Predator on her own, and achieve what is called Ku̵htaamia, a rite of passage where a hunter is celebrated for besting a large beast. Predator spinoffs, and then rebooted twice with 2010’s Predators and 2018’s The Predator. The latter film—directed by Shane Black, who appeared in 1987’s Predator—was clearly designed to produce sequels that never actually came to fruition after controversy, bad reviews, and a mild box-office take. The Predator first started prowling in the 1987 film directed by John McTiernan and starring, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The bulky Austrian action star plays Dutch, a commando who is part of a team dispatched in an unidentified but coded as Central American jungle to handle a Communist insurgency that goes awry when, surprise, there’s an alien on the loose, skinning people alive and murdering for fun. It’s an archetypal narrative—almost Disney Princess-esque—thrown onto a Predator movie with all the green goo and ridiculous kills that entails.

Prey, Dan Trachtenberg's prequel to the Predator franchise, will be bypassing theaters for a streaming debut on Hulu, so Disney can avoid having to put it ...

Given the current box office climate, Disney might well have chosen to give Prey a theatrical run, if all things were equal. But, according to Variety’s Adam B. Vary, before it was acquired by Disney, 20th Century Fox had a deal with HBO Max to stream all its theatrical releases there. Disney also owns a majority stake in Hulu, which is where it likes to put its more adult-oriented content that doesn’t fall under the Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, or Marvel brands. Predator is owned by, and Prey was made by, 20th Century Studios (formerly 20th Century Fox). Disney acquired 20th Century Fox in 2019. And they’re turning their back on straight-to-streaming releases, even to the extent that Warner Bros. has canceled its HBO Max Batgirl film completely. While some studios sought to push films to streaming to boost their subscriber numbers during the pandemic, the box office has well and truly bounced back this year, led by the extraordinary success of Top Gun: Maverick. Studios are now betting on theatrical runs for films in well-known franchises — like the Predator series — boosting their profitability.

The 'Raphael Adolini 1715' pistol at the end of 'Prey' was once held by Danny Glover in the final moments of 'Predator 2.'

How did a Spanish pirate’s pistol end up in the hands of French hunters in America? Prey makes it clear that none of the Frenchmen had ever encountered a creature like the Predator before. If Adolini indeed gave the weapon to a Predator himself in this continuity, did that same Predator have another, later encounter with (possibly non-French) humans and lose it? The weapon’s backstory was fleshed out in the 1996 anniversary anthology issue A Decade of Dark Horse #1, in the story “Predator: 1718” by Henry Gilroy and Igor Kordey. The tale opens on Spanish pirate Captain Raphael Adolini, whose crew mutinies against him when he seeks to return stolen gold to the church for which it had been destined. It isn’t until the very end of the film that we glimpse our first and only real Easter egg: a flintlock pistol engraved with the words Raphael Adolini 1715, hinting at an entire potential timeline leading up to 1990’s Predator 2. Aboard their spaceship, just before they fly off, one of them throws the pistol to LAPD Lieutenant Mike Harrigan, played by Danny Glover, perhaps as a sign of respect. During her escape, she finds a pistol which she’s taught to use by one of the injured hunters.

Dan Trachtenberg movie Prey on Hulu is the best Predator since the first, using the postcolonial theme in new and thoughtful ways.

It seems appropriate that the climax of the movie finds the creature trapped in a literal quagmire, almost swallowed by the landscape. Naru is undergoing the kühtaamia, a ritual in which she must hunt a creature strong enough to hunt her. “You think the reason for kühtaamia is to prove you can hunt,” Sumu (Stefany Mathias) warns Naru. “But there’s only one reason: to survive.” Taabe summarizes the importance of the ritual in setting boundaries, “When the lion comes, you tell that thing, ‘This is as far as you go. There is a thematic point being made here, with the implication that the Predator is perhaps best understood as a form of cosmic karmic justice for Dillon’s illegal and off-the-record foreign intervention. The film is set on the American frontier, primarily within the Comanche Nation. Repeatedly throughout the film, the Predator is likened to the European settlers who are encroaching on the North American continent. Part of the genius of Predator lies in the obvious thematic layers running through the movie. Much like the Americans and the Europeans traveling to Africa with their guns and traps, the Predator arrives on Earth with more advanced technology to stalk and kill its prey. At its core, the Predator is a modern science fiction take on the concept of “the great white hunter.” The term applied to real-life figures like Alan Black and Frederick Selous, along with fictional creations like Allan Quatermain. These figures were often Europeans or Americans who traveled to Africa to hunt exotic game. Ironically, Trachtenberg dares to go smaller with Prey. The film has the shortest runtime of the five films in the franchise. Working with writer Patrick Aison, Trachtenberg hones in on what the original Predator was about and finds a way to tie Prey directly into those big themes. However, the franchise has a surprisingly uneven track record, with both Predator 2 and The Predator fumbling a remarkably simple formula. The Predator franchise is built around a beautiful monster design and a deceptively straightforward premise: What if there were an alien big game hunter?

A former basketball player and longtime butcher, Dane DiLiegro has found his calling playing creatures in Hollywood.

He signed a series of one-year contracts with teams in Italy (his father’s grandparents were from Gaeta and Canosa di Puglia) and Israel (his mother is Jewish). “I was a rebounder, a defender, a screen-setter,” he said. He noted that there were only a handful of performers in Hollywood with DiLiegro’s build, flexibility and athleticism, and that they got nearly all the monster parts. The following week DiLiegro flew to L.A. to pitch his food show, look at apartments and check out a couple of special effects shops. “The idea was to create content so that I could eventually host a culinary travel TV show.” The 34-year-old DiLiegro is not the kind of actor who can be hired to play in the background of a scene: he can’t blend into a crowd shot. “You have to learn to live in discomfort,” DiLiegro said. To bear the weight of a 65-pound suit and 40 pounds of animatronic equipment, he’s got to stay thin and robust. “As a kid, I’d prowl around my house on all fours, like a beast,” he said. DiLiegro has quickly become one of Hollywood’s top “creature actors.” Sheathed in form-fitting, foam-and-latex get-ups, he appears on-screen in the guise of ghouls, space aliens and whatever a screenwriter can dream up. “I shot the entire movie essentially blind, with my head in the neck of this being,” he said. “A rite of passage for all creature actors.” “It felt like a sort of monster bar mitzvah for me,” he recalled.

The Predator franchise is an unusual beast, one fantastic action/horror blockbuster in the 80s that multiple filmmakers have tried and failed to follow up.

Every moment of Prey feels tightly crafted, it does exactly what it sets out to do, and it does it with aplomb. As she does everything she can to win a position of favor and fails at every turn, she begins to notice something deadlier than the typical wildlife in the woods. Despite her skill in medicine, she longs for the glory and pride of life as a hunter. Despite the disapproval of her elders, she trains hard, becoming a talented warrior and an almost preternaturally gifted hunter. The Predator franchise is an unusual beast, one fantastic action/horror blockbuster in the 80s that multiple filmmakers have tried and failed to follow up. It's the first big franchise feature of its kind to star an almost fully Native American cast.

A mysterious orange flower becomes Naru's secret weapon in Prey when she gets hunted down by a Predator – here is everything we know about the medicinal flower ...

Naru becomes invisible to the Predator when she ingests the orange flower because the flower reduces her body temperature. Since Naru and her mother use a local name, "orange tutsia," to describe the flower, it is hard to determine whether it is real or only exists in Prey's universe. However, Naru later capitalizes on her sharp wit and survival instincts and deduces a perfect plan to overpower the fortress-like creature.

Predator prequel Prey features the creature's first visit to Earth — and a surprising tie-in to the original films.

And as for the connection to the Predator mythology at large...well, that's revealed during Naru's encounter with the fur trappers. With the pistol now appearing in Prey, it's a clever way for Trachtenberg to pay homage to the previous Predator films while also staying true to the film's time period. If Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison return for a sequel with Midthunder, the idea of Naru having to fend off multiple Predators could definitely make for great sequel fodder. Victorious, Naru returns to her tribe with the Predator's head and is made the war chief. Despite Naru's efforts to warn them, the members of her tribe fall to the Predator's superior weaponry. This has led to critical acclaim, and is extremely fitting given that this year marks the 35th anniversary of the original Predator film.

This article contains Prey spoilers. Who knew the secret to the Predator franchise's future was to always go back in time?

In essence, the animated sequence suggests that Naru’s victory over the Predator became the stuff of legend and oral tradition: a story that was passed down from one generation to the next, including eventually on ledger paper. And given how the lone Predator in Prey can be viewed as a metaphor for European incursions into this land… At most, we’ve reached a kind of intermission before the real test comes when the Predators return to Comanche lands in force. This weekend’s Prey is the culmination of years of passion, and years of planning, from the filmmaker who wrested the Predator movies away from their recent and failed experiments of franchise-building in the future. The “post-credits scene” in Prey is technically neither after the credits or a full scene. however there is more to the story if you paid close attention to the end credits…

The Predator franchise is the ugly step-child of horror monster cannon. Fans know about it, are aware of it, but don't necessarily give it the credit it ...

The director puts his faith in a relative newcomer to shoulder the movie. At every increasing moment of this journey, Naru experiences a change in front of the camera, and it’s not just talked about in passing. Naru (Amber Midthunder) is a Comanche woman who aims to become a warrior by embarking on the “kühtaamia,” a rite of passage ritual where the hunter hunts the hunter who hunts them.

For a striking film like Prey, a highly anticipated entry in the Predator series, to be relegated to streaming is a grave disservice to cinema.

The closer and closer the film was to its release, the more strange of a decision this became. While it certainly seems like Prey will thankfully get some sort of physical release later this year, it is hard to shake the feeling of how quickly this could change if a streaming service decided to prohibit that. While you should absolutely still take in the viciously vibrant experience of Prey, its lackluster release serves as the most present and profound example of why solely streaming is not the best path forward. While this is by no means the first time that something like this has happened in the streaming age, there still is the unshakeable feeling that this was a missed opportunity. Lean and mean with a sharp eye for striking visuals, it is a genuinely outstanding work that demands to be seen on the biggest canvas possible. It features a riveting performance from Amber Midthunder as Naru, a resourceful hunter who is seeking to somehow track down the infamous Predator and kill it.

If it bleeds, we can kill it. But how does Prey connect to the bigger Predator franchise, and is there an end credits scene? Let's discuss!

So just like in other installments of the Predator franchise, the victorious hunter has to figure out how the alien tech works and how to find ways to defeat it. It’s this pistol that Naru tosses to the elders… It's really cool, but the last thing we see is a shot of the Predator ships emerging from a group of clouds... And in fact, the basic story in Prey is also pretty standard Predator-style stuff, in a good way – a fierce human warrior uses their wits and their environment to hunt down and kill a deadly alien warrior whose sole purpose for being there is to hunt and kill. As our hero, she’s the one who starts to figure out that there’s something out there in the forest that could very well be hunting her tribe. Hulu’s Prey takes The Predator way back in time, pitting one of the greatest hunters in the galaxy versus Comanche warriors in the 1700s.