PG-13 for Predator: Badlands? Producer Says Don’t Rule It Out

Here we go: the next Predator movie is both exactly what you expect and not at all what you expect. It is set way out in the future on some remote planet, stars a young outcast Predator teaming up with Elle Fanning, and it might actually sneak a PG-13 past the ratings board by swapping red blood for alien goo. Yes, really.

What Predator: Badlands is doing differently

Director Dan Trachtenberg is not repeating Prey. That was a lone-wolf survival story. This time he is building what he calls a relationship-driven adventure that leans into a buddy-movie dynamic between its leads. The setup: Dek (played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a Predator kicked out of his clan, crosses paths with Thia (Elle Fanning) and the two set off across dangerous terrain looking for the ultimate opponent. It is the franchise, but pushed into pure sci-fi: future setting, alien world, no humans in sight.

The ratings chess game: PG-13 that hits like an R?

Here is the inside baseball bit. Producer Ben Rosenblatt told IGN the film is as intense as previous Predator entries, but the lack of human characters might open a back door to a PG-13. The logic: aliens and robots can lose all kinds of not-red fluids without tripping the MPA’s blood alarms.

'We don’t have any humans in the movie and so we don’t have any human red blood. So we’re hoping that’s gonna play to our advantage. We’re going to go as hard as we possibly can within those constraints, and we think we’ll be able to do some pretty awesomely gruesome stuff. But in colors other than red.'

Rosenblatt added that they are aiming for a PG-13 that still feels like an R, which, beyond ratings gamesmanship, is about widening the audience. If you are getting flashbacks to Alien vs Predator, you are not wrong. The 2004 crossover was the first PG-13 in this family, though its violence was deliberately dialed down for the broader crowd. Badlands is trying to thread a trickier needle: keep the bite, change the color.

But the MPA is not a vending machine

There is a reason studios sweat over this stuff: the board is famously inconsistent. The documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated laid that bare years ago. And there are some very relevant cautionary tales:

• Army of Darkness (1992): Sam Raimi shot it hoping for PG-13, with way less gore than the earlier Evil Dead films. One absurd, geyser-sized blood gag was enough to lock in an R.
• Spawn (new Arrow 4K release interview): Todd McFarlane points out the movie barely shows human blood, but the subject matter (Devil, Hell, demons) pushed the MPA to slap an R on it unless they cut even more.
• Alien vs Predator (2004): Did get PG-13, but it earned it by sanding down the violence, not by reimagining what counts as blood.

So yes, Badlands could land a PG-13 thanks to the 'no humans, no red' gambit. Or the board could decide a gnarly decapitation is a gnarly decapitation, neon splatter be damned. Either way, Trachtenberg and Rosenblatt sound like they are making the movie they want to make: a sci-fi two-hander that keeps the Predator edge, even if the blood is Pantone TBD.