Predator: Badlands hit Hulu last week and needed exactly one day to climb into the top spot. It is Dan Trachtenberg's third crack at this franchise and easily among the best-reviewed, which is wild given how bumpy Predator sequels have been for decades. Also: if you stuck around through the main credits, you caught a stealth cameo with some genre-world ringers.
The stealth cameo you probably missed
The voice guiding Kwei's Ship Computer? That computerized chatter belongs to the Duffer brothers, as in the Stranger Things creators. Trachtenberg says he actually got close to directing an episode of Stranger Things for its final season, but the timing turned into a three-way crunch: Badlands and his animated anthology Killer of Killers both got the go-ahead, and something had to give.
"I was supposed to do an episode of Stranger Things... then Badlands and Killer of Killers got greenlit at basically the same time... I had to bow."
Even so, the camps overlapped. They shared parts of the same sound team and ended up mixing Stranger Things and Badlands at the same facility, which turned into some very convenient hanging out. When it came time to record the ship's voice, Trachtenberg tossed them the invite for a quick cameo.
Here is the very nerdy bit: the computer speaks an alien language that is apparently a mouthful to perform, and because there are two Duffers, the team layered their reads into a single, more robotic effect.
"We had a hilarious time in the booth... the fact that there are two of them let us smush their voices together to make it feel more computerized."
Also funny in a credits-quirk way: Badlands has a tiny cast with only five on-screen names, so the Duffers end up weirdly high on the card despite being disembodied ship voices.
Trachtenberg's Predator hot streak
Since Arnold and the mercs first got stalked through the jungle in 1987, this series has cycled through a lot of creative hands. Stephen Hopkins, Nimrod Antal, and Shane Black each steered mainline sequels; there were the Alien vs. Predator detours with Paul W. S. Anderson and, later, Greg and Colin Strause. The roll call of talent is stacked — Danny Glover, Bill Paxton, Adrien Brody, Mahershala Ali, Laurence Fishburne, Thomas Jane, Boyd Holbrook, and more — yet most follow-ups struggled to connect.
Trachtenberg changed the temperature with Prey, a lean, brutal prequel that landed on Disney+ during the pandemic. Amber Midthunder led it, the story stayed simple, the Predator punched hard, and suddenly the franchise felt sharp again. He kept that momentum going with an animated pivot before circling back for the new live-action chapter.
- Prey (2022): A back-to-basics prequel on streaming, starring Amber Midthunder, that reignited the brand with clean storytelling and gnarly action.
- Killer of Killers (2025): An animated anthology that dropped on Netflix to strong buzz, setting the table for more expansion.
- Predator: Badlands (2026): Now on Hulu and quickly a hit; it flips the perspective by centering the Predator as the lead and nudges the sandbox closer to an Alien/Predator mash-up.
Where does it go next? That part is open. There are multiple paths in play, and it sounds less like an if and more like a what-first situation. However it shakes out, expectations are officially sky-high again for anything with mandibles.