The Predator is officially released in theaters now and although the ending for the film satisfied most of the plot's developments there were some last-minute changes made which moviegoers might be interested in knowing about. Shane Black re-shot the entire third act of The Predator earlier this year in Vancouver and thanks to Yahoo! Movies, we now know the full extent of what was removed and changed.
As many of you will recall, originally The Predator was going to feature a team of Commando Predators working with Stargazer Base but that entire concept was thrown out the window despite footage of the Comando Predators being filmed. Black addresses this cut in his interview:
The structure remained largely the same. There was a proponent of working with the predators, played by Edward James Olmos, and there was a suggestion that maybe he was trying to recruit the first predator in the movie.
And when we went back we thought that that was one bad guy too many, one character too many in retrospect, and regretfully we removed his role from the movie and just let Sterling K Brown carry it solo.
Also the Ark site scene, there was a whole different… it was the same set, the same sequence basically, but all set during the day with them attacking the Ark and freeing the kid, and running away with the predator chasing them but it was all daylight. It just… we started to do our effects work, and it looked kind of cheap in a way. It looked… it didn’t really feel like a big expensive movie when the predators are just running around in daylight like that.
We could have finished the film like that, honestly we could have, but I just didn’t think it would work as well. Thankfully, I have to credit 20th Century Fox, this was a big, fairly expensive deal to turn that back into night time, and they went along with it.
We went up and rebuilt it on a different location, we put the ship back in, restaged the the attack on the ship, and the rescue of the kid, all at night.
Black also went on to address why the film focuses so prominently on disabilities, which in The Predator is interpreted as our bodies adjusting to the next step in our evolution - something the new Hybrid Predators have a keen interest in:
I think there’s a case to be made that people who have what is viewed as a disability are actually the most valuable members of our society. There are those among us who consider schizophrenia to just be another form of existence and not necessarily even… there’s one theory that they’re seeing something that other people simply don’t.
I personally suffer from tourettes disease. I bark and chirp sometimes so I’ve had to play with that, and I thought I always try to keep a sense of humour about it. It doesn’t show up all the time, but when it does it’s usually with a girlfriend or something, so I try to keep a sense of humour about it.
You can read the entire interview over on Yahoo! Movies.
What did you think of The Predator's ending? Let us know your honest opinions below! Would you have liked to see what the original cut of the film included, Commando Predators and all? Let us know that as well!
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