Shane Black's Predator Will Shoot By October
Director reveals filming details on massive event movie.
What we know about Shane Black's upcoming Predator sequel project doesn't really amount to a great deal. But as long as the action movie veteran is involved, we've all got concern to be very excited.
Black is currently on the road promoting The Nice Guys, and he's now revealed that he's planning to start shooting by this October to AFP. The film is currently slated for March 2018, suggesting a considering production period - but then post-production will presumably take a significant chunk of time if the actioner is going to live up to its epic billing.
The sequel has been confirmed as a sequel to the original two Predator films and the under-rated 2010 offering Predators. Hopefully, any parallels with the Alien vs Predator movies will be purely incidental. Inevitably, Black claims the film is going to bigger than anything that's come in the franchise so far:
"To the best of my knowledge, the train is rolling. It took some convincing because they've been putting out these movies all along with a $50-60 million budget, and they all had a guaranteed return. But there was never the sense that it was an event picture. It was more like 'I understand another Predator movie is coming out -- maybe we'll see it maybe we won't.'"
Black actually has previous with the franchise, having starred as radioman Rick Hawkins in the original. Given his track record, we can probably expect this new effort to include at least a cameo by Robert Downey Jr and a Christmas setting.
The director says his Predator movie will have an old school flavour in line with Joel Silver's original vision, only with a more epic scale. Hopefully that doesn't mean shifting it out of a jungle setting, because the city setting from Predator 2 was not the smartest move.
And even more hopefully they don't just add a load of Predators and hope that there's strength in numbers. The multiple monster element in Predators was a good move, but the real strength of the original was in the solitude of the monster and the distillation at the end into a single man v monster dynamic.
That's the real spirit of Predator, and we can only hope that's what Black wants to channel back into.
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