Despite the Disneyfication of Predators: Badlands, the PG-13 action movie is more violent than its MPAA (now MPA) rating might suggest. Far from the classic Schwarzenegger original, in which brutal bloodshed and gory geysers of blood splashed the screen, Badlands brilliantly sidesteps human carnage by populating its simple story with compassionate monsters and sentient machines who cannot bleed in the traditional sense.
Predator: Badlands ingeniously delivers as much graphic violence and extreme gore as an R-rated movie. Badlands may still feel like a cross between Alien, Predator, and The Mandalorian, but at least hardcore Predator fans are treated with plenty of inventive death scenes. Here’s how Dan Trachtenberg and company delivered more lethal action than the movie’s rating may indicate.
‘Predator: Badlands’ Premise, Explained
Hailed for its original take on the Predator mythology, Badlands works hard to make viewers care for, sympathize with, and root for a young Yautja predator named Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi). Dek is the runt of his predator clan, who is about to be culled by his father, Njhorr (Shuster-Koloamatangi), for being weak. When his brother protects Dek from their father, Dek travels to Genna, the “Death Planet.” Dek plans to hunt and kill the Kalisk, the mightiest beast on the planet, and return home with its skull as a trophy, win the respect of his father, come of age as an adult predator, and earn its invisibility cloak.
Once arriving on Genna, a hostile planet with deadly flora and fauna, Dek meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a cheery synthetic robot missing her legs. Thia and an identical robot named Tessa (also played by Fanning) are owned by the powerful Weyland-Yutani corporation and have been sent to Genna to kill the Kalisk for the corporation’s studies. In the quest to humanize Dek, the Predator forges a tender bond with the synthetic Thia, who tries to teach the monster the value of family.
As the movie enters buddy-comedy territory with Dek and Thia traveling across Genna to find Thia’s legs and track and hunt the Kalisk, Disney’s brand shines through when a cutesy baby monster called Bud shows up and turns the movie into The Mandalorian lite. Fortunately, one area where Predator purists will have a good time is the inventive deaths and corresponding carnage that belie the movie’s PG-13 rating.
How ‘Predator: Badlands’ Secretly Subverts the MPA Ratings
Why Is ‘Predator: Badlands’ Rated PG-13?
Despite its basic story, Predator: Badlands cleverly subverts its PG-13 rating to deliver intense action. One of the surest ways to earn an R-rating in a movie is to depict onscreen violence, visible carnage, and high amounts of bloodshed. But what if the bloodshed did not come from human beings? What if the color of the blood were no longer red?
In Badlands, the creatures on Genna, such as the bone bison and the Kalisk itself, do not share any physiological human traits, including red blood. The aliens have their own biological makeup, and when a creature on Genna is physically harmed, they often bleed a glowing blue substance. This gives director Dan Trachtenberg incredible leeway to conduct as much onscreen violence as possible, without the consequences of the MPA ratings board citing excessive bloodshed. It’s a genuinely smart approach to give old-school fans the level of violence they expect while also watering down the carnage.
Robert Rodriguez took a similar approach on From Dusk Till Dawn, where he replaced red human blood with green vampire blood to secure an R-rating instead of NC-17. Audiences suspend disbelief enough, knowing that it would make logical sense for a non-human to have a different lifeblood. But Trachtenberg’s tactic also aligns with the original Predator movie, in which the chameleonic monster was tracked after it was discovered to have green blood.
Badlands is nothing if not entertaining throughout, and it stays engaging by giving audiences big-scale battles with violent mayhem on par with an R-rated action movie. Limbs are hacked off, heads are stomped to dust and savagely severed from the spine, skulls are ripped out of the throat, and other excessive bouts of violence occur that would instantly earn an R-rating in another movie. Yet, by using blue bloodshed from the monsters on Genna and Dek’s green blood that his species showed in the original Predator movie, Badlands nimbly sidestepped an R-rating to become an amusing PG-13 installment in the franchise.
But off-color blood is only half the equation. The other brilliant way Trachtenberg achieved a PG-13 rating was by using mechanical robots instead of human beings. Thia, Tessa, and their army of Weyland-Yutani robots have no blood and can sustain huge amounts of bodily damage that would otherwise warrant an R-rating. If Thia were human, Trachtenberg couldn’t possibly introduce her character with a freshly severed torso. Nor could he repeatedly have Thia and the others brutally bludgeoned, slammed around, snapped in half, and viciously pulverized if they were human and still earn a PG-13 rating.
Not to spoil too much, but there’s one effective sequence where the Kalisk regenerates its severed head in ways reminiscent of John Carpenter’s The Thing, albeit with far more cartoonish CGI. Although The Thing‘s creatures were also alien, they replicated human visages and bled red blood, rightly earning an R-rating. By being devoid of humans, Trachtenberg could amplify the violence without having similar consequences in Predator: Badlands.
The ‘Predator’ Franchise Considers a Schwarzenegger Return
After revitalizing the Predator franchise with Prey in 2022, Dan Trachtenberg followed up with the acclaimed animated movie Predator: Killer of Killers and Predator: Badlands in 2025. With each entry earning critical and commercial success, Trachtenberg has begun considering ways to have Arnold Schwarzenegger return to the franchise as the iconic paramilitary commando Dutch. The idea came about after the ever-quotable Dutch made a cameo in Killer of Killers, prompting producer Ben Rosenblatt to tell Deadline:
“Obviously, the holy grail of Predator movies would be getting Arnold back in there. And it’s always been something in the back of our minds that it would be really great to see him come back to this franchise that he’s made iconic, and that’s made him iconic.
So, he’s been really wonderful. Arnold and Dan have met a couple of times now. He’s been really interested in what we’re doing, he’s a real fan of what we’ve done so far, from what I understand. And we’re really excited. After Predator: Badlands comes out, we’ll see and have more conversations. Hopefully, we’ll have a chance to do something with Arnold, because that would be awesome.”
With Disney now owning the Predator franchise, the question turns to how Schwarzenegger’s return would be handled if it becomes a reality. Will more PG-13 Predator movies be made if Schwarzenegger returns? Will he actually return as Dutch in a starring action role, or would it be more of a winking cameo? Would Dutch’s return necessitate a more adult-driven, R-rated action affair? Considering how well-received the first mainline PG-13 entry in franchise history has been, these types of questions become much harder.
Regardless of what transpires with the Predator franchise, Trachtenberg admirably worked around the MPA to deliver extreme violence and bone-crushing action in Badlands that would easily have earned an R-rating in a movie with human characters. Predator: Badlands is now playing in theaters.
- Release Date
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November 5, 2025
- Runtime
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107 minutes
- Producers
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Brent O’Connor, John Davis, Marc Toberoff, Dan Trachtenberg, Ben Rosenblatt
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Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi
Dek / Father
