After a seven-year hiatus — and two films that went straight to streaming — the Predator franchise returns to theaters this week with Predator: Badlands. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg, and starring Elle Fanning, the movie follows the unlikely partnership between an alien hunter (played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) and an android (Fanning).
If you see the film in theaters this weekend and want to keep the horror sci-fi action vibes going at home — or you can’t make it to the theater just yet and you want to scratch that same itch from the comfort of your couch — here are five options for further home viewing that are all available to stream right now.
Total Recall (1990)
The Predator franchise started as a rough-and-tumble Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle with a killer creature design by Stan Winston. When it became a hit, producers started work on a sequel, one that in the initial stages would have followed Schwarzenegger’s Dutch as a cop who battled another Predator on the streets of Los Angeles. But Schwarzenegger was never satisfied with the script for Predator 2 (or the money he was getting offered to make it [or both]) so Predator 2 moved on without him — and he instead went off and made another even better sci-fi action classic.
In Total Recall, Schwarzenegger plays a man named Douglas Quaid, a lowly construction worker in a dystopian future. Or is he really a man named Hauser who has been brainwashed and tricked into believing he is Quaid so he can’t meddle in the affairs of the powerful overseer of a Martian colony? Paul Veroheven’s twisty thriller combines genuinely badass action, a witty sense of humor, and thought-provoking themes about identity and selfhood. It’s currently streaming on Paramount+.
Midnight Run (1988)
Yes, Predator: Badlands has plenty of science-fiction and horror elements. But it’s also about two unlikely partners on an adventure — a Predator named Dek and an android named Thia — which also makes it a mismatched buddy movie. And if you like mismatched buddy movies, you better have seen the best mismatched buddy movie of them all: Midnight Run.
It stars those two great icons of action cinema: Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. Okay, perhaps these are not the names one thinks of when one imagines a classic ’80s action picture, but in some ways, that is part of the fun. These are unlikely subjects for an all-out comic chase film. De Niro plays a bounty hunter hired to find and return a mob accountant (Grodin) who jumped his bail. The two men couldn’t be more different, which only accentuates the comedy as their cross-country trip goes wildly off the rails. As of this writing, Midnight Run is currently streaming on Netflix.
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Oblivion (2013)
One of the pleasures of the Predator movies, especially since they’ve been taken over by director Dan Trachtenberg, are their endless array of clever weapons and gadgets deployed by the Predators. And if you dig that sort of fun yet functional sci-fi production design, it’s worth tracking down Oblivion, one of the most beautifully designed sci-fi movies of the century.
Tom Cruise plays the last man on Earth, a sentry charged with holding down the proverbial fort on an Earth abandoned by humanity after an alien attack. But Cruise’s character can’t remember his past, and there’s something fishy about his lonely, sad job. Gradually he uncovers the sinister truth about his post-apocalyptic reality, and sets about putting things right.
It’s not the most original sci-fi story in the world, but every last bit of tech, from the weaponry to the bubbleship Cruise pilots around the planet, feels so tactile and real. Oblivion, which was also the beginning of the partnership between Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, is currently on Netflix.
Mickey 17 (2025)
It’s been a really good year for science-fiction movies, and one of the best is already streaming on HBO Max. Bong Joon-ho’s long-awaited follow-up to Parasite follows a man in a dystopian future — so many dystopian futures lately in cinema, I wonder why?!? Everything seems to be going so great!! — who agrees to become an “expendable,” tackling deadly tasks that are necessary for the future of space colonization.
Every time Mickey performs one of these tasks and dies on the job he’s reprinted in a new body. (Hence the “expendable” part.) He’s up to his 17th iteration when there’s a screwup — which results in an 18th Mickey running around at the same time. Mickey 17 may be a bit more uneven than Bong’s Oscar-winning Parasite, but maybe that is form following function. A movie with 18 nearly identical protagonists with a few subtle differences of personality should probably have some fluctuations of mood and tone of its own as well. Mickey 17 is now on HBO Max.
Predator: Killer of Killers
Predator: Badlands is actually the second of two Predator movies released this year by director Dan Trachtenberg. The first, an animated anthology film called Killer of Killers, went straight to Hulu over the summer. If you avoided it because you thought a Predator cartoon couldn’t possibly live up to the level of action in a live-action film, think again. It might actually be the bloodiest and most violent Predator movie ever made.
It tells several short stories, each involving warriors from various time periods: A viking, a samurai, a World War II fighter pilot, all of whom meet and battle a Predator. The stories then intersect in a finale that feels very organic, and even hints at an elaborate alien mythology that could pay off in future sequels. Because Killer of Killers is an anthology, the individual stories are relatively brief and the characters aren’t fleshed out as much as they perhaps could be — but that also means the film never drags, and it’s never too long before the next wild animated action sequence begins. Killer of Killers is still available on Hulu (or on Disney+, if you happen to subscribe to both services.)
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