Shane Black Explains How ‘The Predator’ Reshoots Changed the Movie

At San Diego Comic-Con, 20th Century Fox brought some exclusive footage from the upcoming sci-fi sequel The Predator, and director Shane Black was on hand with the ensemble cast to tease what fans can expect from the return of one of the galaxy’s most deadly hunters. We already went over all that in our extensive Comic-Con coverage, but the director revealed a bit more about the movie outside of the film’s panel in Hall H.

As we’ve heard, The Predator had to undergo some extensive reshoots that reportedly changed much of the third act. Now Shane Black has clarified why those reshoots had to be done and what they were trying to accomplish by doing them.

The Predator Reshoots Explained

Shane Black starts talking about reshoots around the 1:20 mark in the video above from Collider, but for those of you don’t have time for that, here’s what he had to say about part of The Predator reshoots:

“Part of it was we were trying to jam a lot into a five-pound bag. So we had a big appetite. One of the things about that was if you want to do all of this stuff with this much money, you probably need to shoot during the day because during the night would be prohibitive. To our chagrin, and it’s one me, when we saw the footage during the day, the climax of the movie, *exasperated sigh*, it doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look scary in the daytime. Then we decided to streamline the plot so we could go back up and really concentrate on the scarier elements of doing it at night. So literally, as they’ve said, the difference is night and day. We took everything out of day and put it into darkness.”

Indeed, the Predator has always done his best killing at night. And there’s something about him stalking around the darkness that makes him that much more deadly. Changing the setting from day to night would explain why three-fourths of the third act needed to be rewritten, especially if they streamlined the plot in order to make the reshoost more efficient and less expensive.  Hopefully that doesn’t mean the movie suffers, but the way Shane Black talks is that it helped them hone in on what makes the Predator such a threatening presence:

 “[The Predator] is so iconic, and people are so used to it by now, the way he looks. For instance, you could probably go outside right now and see a fairly serviceable Predator walking around Comic-Con. The Predator in garish light is not going to have the same effect nowadays. But at night, giving glimpses, and emphasizing not just how the Predator looks too, because we didn’t want to change too much, the way he acts, the alertness, the athleticism. Everyone knows what they look like, let’s remind them how deadly they are. Let’s remind them how the Predator strikes and retreats, how bloodily and efficiently he just makes mince meat out of anybody who gets in his way. If you can reawaken in people, not just the knowledge of ,”Oh, look, that’s what the Predator looks like,” no, this is what the Predator acts like. This is how badass he is.”

As Shane Black said, that was part of the reason they needed to do reshoots. But we’ve also heard that some fraction of the reshoots included adding some references to the other Predator movies, including a couple weapons from Predator 2 and Alien vs Predator and some grainy photos of the titular creature from the first two films. They’re probably nothing more than insert shots with Easter eggs put in there for fans to soak up.

The Predator stars Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Keegan-Michael Key, Olivia Munn, Sterling K. Brown, Alfie Allen, Thomas Jane, Augusto Aguilera, Jake Busey and Yvonne Strahovski.

If you haven’t watched it yet, check out the most recent trailer for The Predator right here. And be sure to check out our detailed recap of The Predator footage that was shown at Comic-Con, including a surprising amount of comedy alongside the expected sci-fi action.

The Predator hits theaters on September 14, 2018.

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