20 Recent Horror Movies That Made ONE Huge Mistake

Even though Predator: Badlands was actually pretty damn good, it inherently rubbed many dyed-in-the-wool fans the wrong way because of the decision to go the PG-13 route.

The rating announcement swiftly invoked the fanbase's ire, given that every other film in the franchise had been rated R, suggesting that Badlands would be a sanitised attempt to broaden the series' reach.

Now, that PG-13 does come with the asterisk that there are no human characters in the movie, and so with all the violence being meted out against androids and aliens, Dan Trachtenberg was able to push the violence further.

All the same, a Predator film without gory red spine-rips just isn't a Predator film to some fans, as likely contributed to the film underperforming at the box office, ending its run with a mediocre $184.6 million against a hefty $100 million budget.

Even though Trachtenberg did a laudable job effectively trojan-horsing an R-rated movie into a PG-13, there are those who couldn't help but see it as a cynical commercial ploy, ensuring the discourse surrounding the movie was tainted from the jump.