Badlands Ending, Stranger Things Cameos Explained by Director

SPOILER ALERT: This story includes major plot details, including the ending, of “Predator: Badlands,” currently playing in theaters.

When Dan Trachtenberg first began conceiving “Predator: Badlands,” the director knew he wanted to do something totally different with the 38-year-old sci-fi franchise. He’d already done it once with 2022’s “Prey,” which is set in the early 1700s and follows a Comanche woman (Amber Midthunder) who must fend off the fearsome alien monster with little more than her wits and her trusty dog. Trachtenberg did it again with the franchise’s first animated feature, 2025’s “Predator: Killer of Killers” (directed with Joshua Wassung), which chronicles how a ninth century Viking warrior, a 17th century Japanese ninja and a 20th century American WWII pilot all manage to defeat one of the titular aliens — aka the Yautja — only to be captured, frozen in suspended animation and then thrown together into a gladiatorial battle overseen by a brutal Yautja warlord.

For “Badlands” (written, like “Prey,” by Patrick Aison), Trachtenberg decided to invert the entire premise of the series, and cast the Yautja not as his story’s villain, but as its protagonist.

The movie opens with Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) sparring with his brother, Kwei (Mike Homik), to try to prove himself worthy of their father, Njohrr (Reuben De Jong). Instead, Njohrr orders Kwei to execute Dek, who he regards as a disgraceful runt who must be put down. Instead, Kwei sacrifices himself to free Dek, sending his brother to the deadly planet Genna to achieve something no other Yautja has accomplished: killing the planet’s seemingly invincible apex predator, the Kalisk.

On Genna, Dek quickly learns that just about every plant and animal on the planet is actively trying to kill him, until he happens upon two unlikely compatriots. The first is Thia (Elle Fanning), a friendly android from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation — part of the cross-pollination between the “Predator” and “Alien” franchises that started with 2004’s “Alien vs. Predator.” Thia, a member of an all-android expedition to Genna, was separated from her legs during a previous encounter with the Kalisk, so she convinces Dek to use her knowledge of the local flora and fauna as a “tool” for his hunt, so he can return her to her missing lower half. En route, they encounter Bud, a disarmingly endearing creature roughly the size of a large dog who takes such a liking to Dek that it spits on him to mark him as part of its clan. But Dek abandons Bud because he believes Yautja are meant to hunt alone.

Eventually, Dek confronts the Kalisk in a ferocious battle, and succeeds in cutting off its head — only to discover that the Kalisk’s regenerative abilities are so potent that it can literally reconnect its head back onto its body. But when the newly restored Kalisk pounces to kill Dek, it hesitates, stopped short by something it smells on Dek’s body.

At that moment, both Dek and the Kalisk are frozen by Thia’s android sister, Tessa (also Fanning), who is under orders by Weyland-Yutani’s ruthless AI, Mu/th/ur, to capture the Kalisk by any means necessary. Tessa tortures and taunts Dek, shocking Thia, who decides to help Dek escape, even though it means Tessa will decommission her. 

Staggered by Thia’s sacrifice, Dek makes another unexpected discovery after he reunites with Bud: It’s a baby Kalisk, and Tessa has abducted its mother. The Kalisk spared him earlier because Bud had marked him — they’re his family now.

So Dek refocuses his mission, teaming up with Bud to rescue Thia and the Kalisk. Which they do, but when the Kalisk subsequently swallows Tessa whole, the android explodes the heretofore unkillable creature from the inside. So Dek stabs the back of Tessa’s head, killing her permanently.

Dek returns to his home planet, Yautja Prime, and presents his father with Tessa’s skull. His father rebuffs him, but Dek is prepared: They fight, Dek wins, and Bud (who has grown much larger) bites off Njohrr’s head.

The film ends with Dek standing alongside Thia and Bud, his new clan, as a large, menacing Yautja ship appears on the horizon. The ship, Dek explains to Thia, carries his mother. 

As Trachtenberg explains to Variety, the revelation about Bud and the reveal about Dek’s mother were all part of a desire to shake up the “Predator” franchise as much as possible. 

“We’re making a movie where the monster, predator, ugly motherfucker is the protagonist,” he says. “I did not think that should be the only crazy idea.”

The filmmaker talked about how he and his team designed all the creatures on Genna, why “The Avengers” is on his mind when thinking about where the “Predator” franchise could go next, how he got the creators of “Stranger Things” to make a cameo and what advice he got from James Cameron. (Disclosure: Trachtenberg and I became friends when our kids attended the same preschool.)

How did you approach designing the creatures on Genna? Were you making the creatures first and then building a story around them, or vice versa?

It all really came from the narrative. Creature design is really hard. Having done it a couple of times now, it tends to be like, “We’ve seen this kind of silhouette before. What if we make it curvy here, instead of straight, and what if we put the horns on it?” Because we can do visual effects so well now, all of it looks cool, but none of it becomes iconic or stands out. I didn’t want to fall into any of those traps. For instance, we had the scene set in the razor grass field, and a creature that that would have evolved to feed in those fields would have developed armor on its hide and a beak to cover its mouth to help push away the grass, so that crazy Cthulhu-y snout could graze. We just tried to apply that everywhere, thinking of what the actual ecology or the evolution of the planet would be so the creatures ended up feeling related — not just cool for cool’s sake or scary for scary’s sake.

How did you go about designing Bud? He’s kind of cute, and “Predator” and “cute” have not been synonymous in the past.

The movie is very much about characters that appear to be one way, but then are actually quite different. I thought about Rocket Raccoon or Groot — adorable, but also super badass. We’re making a movie where the monster, predator, ugly motherfucker is the protagonist. I did not think that should be the only crazy idea. 

I thought a lot about how “Terminator 2” has one of the most iconic lines in action cinema: “Hasta la vista, baby.” That line comes from a scene where a robot is bonding with the teenage boy, one of the warmest places in the story. I just love the idea of constantly playing with what felt intense and visceral and ferocious and what was emotional. I love that as badass as this movie is, there’s also a warmth and emotionality to it. And then technically, I play a lot of “World of Warcraft” and the Murloc is a creature from “World of Warcraft” that informed her design a little bit. Then it was bouncing back and forth between what a big Bud would be like and what a small Bud would be like to find the right stuff.

Did you worry that you were going to make Bud too cute?

A little bit, which is why Bud has dope action scenes and does some gnarly things. Even “Prey” was story with a warrior and her dog. That came from the silhouette of Mad Max and his pup. There’s always something really cool to me about the badass with the sidekick. It’s something that makes us care in a very specific way. We care about creatures and animals very differently than we care about humans. I love the idea of him backpacking and something little beside him. I always have in my head one shot in “The Monster Squad” of all the kids with Frankenstein in the silhouette of the setting sun. Sometimes I think in that kind of iconography. So that informed it, too.

Was Bud always going to be the baby Kalisk? 

Pretty much. I should say, actually, at one point, we went down a road of, maybe it becomes (the Kalisk). Almost like a gremlin, the same creature that appears small and tiny then molts its skin and then becomes huge. That just felt a little bit too supernatural to me, but I know everyone’s taste may vary. 

The thing that I ended up really loving is that both Dek and Thia are dealing with really upsetting familial situations — abusive parents, so to speak, abusive family — while hunting down what’s supposed to be the most ferocious thing. And actually, that’s the thing in the movie that has the best family relationship. Once again, it all comes from the desire to surprise.

In the moment with the title card, there’s a giant cliffside in the background with a huge, worm-like thing crawling on it. What was that?

I always called that the Rock Biter. There’s a great line in “The Neverending Story”: “A rock biter? A rock biter!” It was always an earworm for me. They’re in the background in a few shots. But you’re like, how come we never actually get up in there and interact with it? 

That’s what I’m getting at, yeah.

(Laughs) We’re always trying to have some sort of food chain element in the frame somewhere, and always make it feel like it’s deadly. So often when we do these kinds of movies — like Skull Island in the in the first half of a “King Kong” movie or whatever — the place is majestic, but then the creatures are deadly. If we’re saying it’s a death planet, everything should be trying to kill and everything should feel dangerous. So there’s something in the corner that’s like eating something else.

How did James Cameron come to be listed in the special thanks in the end credits?

It came in two forms. He had seen “Prey” and loved it — which, there’s no words for that. We shot “Badlands” in New Zealand, up in Auckland and he was down in Wellington making “Avatar.” He invited me to see him doing some of “Avatar,” and we spent some time on his soundstage and when we were in the edit bay, I pitched him what we were doing with the movie, this brand new process having a guy in a prosthetic suit, and then visual effects are taking over for his face. Then we reconvened at dinner, and when he sat down, he said, “I was thinking about what you’re doing on the way over here. And I gotta tell you, think it’s going to work.” That blew wind in my sails all the way back to Auckland.

Then, when we were finishing the movie, the cut was in pretty good shape — not totally finished, but pretty good. I wanted to send it his way to get, if he had the time, whatever feedback he could give. He wrote me a note back that said many things, and one of them was, “I have to tell you, when I first heard about what you’re doing, I did not think it was going to work. But holy crap, you really pulled it off.” And that put wind in my sails. 

I think he just knows exactly what someone needs to hear when they need to hear it. He’s just a tremendously generous filmmaker.

You were going to direct on Season 5 of “Stranger Things” before the strikes changed your schedule, but how did you wind up using the show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, as the voice for the computer on Dek’s ship?

We were mixing “Badlands” on the very same stages where they were mixing “Stranger Things” at the same time. We had some of the same sound mixers working on both. We needed to do the Yautja ship voice, and I was like, “What if I asked the Duffers to do it? How crazy would that be?”  They had no idea that I was gonna hand him a piece of paper with, like, “‘N, G, I, L, A’ is a word. Good luck!” They had to very quickly learn Yautja. The computer voice is heavily treated and needs to sound affected. So actually, smearing their voices together and then doing other stuff in the computer made the perfect voice.

Since “Badlands” integrates the “Alien” universe, did you figure out when in time your movie is in relation to the other movies in both franchise?

Very intentionally, it is the furthest into the future in both “Predator” and “Alien.” When we were making it, I wasn’t really sure what was going on with “Alien: Romulus” and I don’t even know how aware I even was of “Alien: Earth.” So I just didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. I wanted to make sure we were doing our own thing, and selfishly, I’d also done so much “Predator” in different time periods that I was excited for this to be in the future, even past “Alien: Resurrection.”

At the very end of “Badlands,” a ship containing Dek’s mother appears on the horizon. Are you deliberately setting up how you’d want the franchise to continue, with Dek confronting his mother as we meet female Yautja for the first time?

What I love about that ending is that it works as a final twist on the story that we’ve just been seeing, but also sets up an expectation for something that I think is pretty groovy. If I were to go forward, I don’t think that would be the whole reason, but that would be a very cool element to include.

And you’d want to continue with Dek’s story?

What’s so great is we now have all these interesting characters, and who knows what the next one is? I didn’t know the next one was going to be “Killer of Killers” or Dek’s story, and then it ended up we doing both at the same time. There’s many open doors to walk through next, that’s for sure.

So how far inside those doors have you looked to start planing where you would want to go?

It can all go out the door once we start putting pen to paper on stuff, but I’ve looked as far as I could to feel comfortable about what I’m doing. Every movie is a complete thought, not that much unlike the early Marvel stuff before the first “Avengers” movie, where it’s like, those are great movies, and lo and behold, we’re actually setting up that things could come together in a delicious way. But they weren’t like, “See how everything’s interconnected like crazy all of a sudden!” So I’m trying to learn that lesson and make sure that any of these movies that we do are awesome ideas for movies on their own.

“Killer of Killers” ends by connecting back to “Predator,” “Predator 2” and “Prey,” and since you did just evoke the Avengers, have you thought about integrating all of these different threads together into a larger thing?

It’s hard. It’s fun to geek out and think, “Oh my god, wouldn’t it be cool if…,” even on a movie that you’d never expect that to happen in. But it’s only cool if the journey there is equally worth taking.

So how long do you think you could live inside this franchise?

I didn’t think I would be living in it this long. What I realized is that because the Yautja has the code that it has, it’s allowed for me to make the kind of movies that I’ve always wanted to. It is not Michael Myers or Jason. It’s not there just to kill victims in its periphery. It’s a creature with a culture and a code, and it’s looking for the most worthy. That resonates in our lives, where we’re constantly thinking about how we measure up to the outside world, to ourselves, in career and love and whatever it is. So I get to keep making movies with this fulcrum that bears all this thematic weight and brings out the emotional storytelling that I love. And also, because it’s this kick-ass creature with unique designs and assets that other franchises don’t have, I get to also make those stories with kick-ass action. It really has allowed for me to make very different kinds of stories, and have them each be worthy of the franchise itself. 

This story has been edited and condensed.