Prey has been in development since before even 2018's critically panned The Predator was released, with director Dan Trachtenberg and writer Patrick Aison first approaching franchise producer John Davis with their idea for a reboot in 2016. The movie was fast-tracked a few years later, and eventually revealed as "Skulls."
All we knew at the time was that it would going to "follow a Comanche woman who goes against gender norms and traditions to become a warrior." However, it didn't take online sleuths long to figure out that Skulls was actually a codename for a new chapter in the Predator franchise.
The cat was officially out of the bag, though Trachtenberg has previously indicated that he planned to market Prey without ever referencing the iconic alien. Talking to us about the movie earlier this week, the filmmaker revealed that we would have seen the Predator in marketing, but not until a second trailer was released (with that culminating with the big reveal).
"It’s almost not possible," he says in the video above of any attempts to keep the Predator's role a secret. "Certainly, the thing that would have been exciting, that was in the initial pitch for the movie, was that the first trailer would not have a title. You would see the set up of Naru, what she’s experiencing in her tribe, and her setting off to prove herself. When she goes off into the woods, there was a fire in the sky, and that would be it."
"Then, closer to the release of the movie, we’d see a fuller trailer that would include the bear going after her and then being lifted up by the Predator. That would have been the announcement of what this movie was," Trachtenberg continues. "That was my favourite version of releasing it, so you’d get to have that secret movie excitement, but without taking it all the way because people need to know what movie they’re going to see."
It's a real shame this didn't happen, though Prey's streaming debut on Hulu has resulted in a different sort of marketing campaign to the one it would have likely received with a theatrical release.
While the movie hasn't exactly been "dumped" on a streaming platform, it feels like Disney may have had second thoughts about putting another Predator movie in theaters after the decline of the franchise under 20th Century Fox's purview. Given the overwhelmingly positive reactions to Prey thus far, though, something tells us that could change in future.
Prey is set to be released on Hulu on August 5.