Predator Movies Ranked: From Worst to Best!

With the release of Predator: Badlands (you can read Chris Bumbray’s review HERE), we now have (when you count the crossovers with the Alien franchise) nine Predator feature films to kick back and watch – and with that many movies to choose from, we figured this was the perfect time to put together a list of the Predator Movies Ranked! Here they are, all nine of them, listed from Worst to Best:

ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM (2007)

Back in the day, we thought humans never crossed paths with xenomorphs until the events of Alien and that if the creatures ever reached Earth, it would be a doomsday scenario. Then AVP: Alien vs. Predator brought the titular conflict to Earth in the year 2004, and even though the story said humans had been interacting with xenomorphs for thousands of years, at least the modern day action took place in a remote location. Scripted by Shane Salerno and directed by visual effects artists the Brothers Strause, the sequel Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem set out to really rock our world by dropping the xenomorphs into middle America. The small town of Gunnison, Colorado, to be exact. Picking up where AVP left off, with the birth of a xenomorph/Predator hybrid called the Predalien and the space ship crash that followed, AVPR has xenomorphs running loose in the countryside, tormenting regular Americans. Including the most unexpected character to ever appear in one of these movies: a bullied pizza boy. The Predators in the first AVP were inexperienced, but the one in this movie (played by AVP’s Ian Whyte) is a hardened warrior who’s coming in to kick some ass, save the day, and clean up the problem. It’s one of the only great things about this film, and some moments with this Predator feel a lot like moments with the ones from the first two movies. Everything around it ranges from bland to awful, from the imagery that’s often too dark to see and uninteresting characters to an atrocious sequence involving the Predalien pumping “bellybursters” into pregnant women in a maternity ward. The movie is an appalling mess.

THE PREDATOR (2018)

Bringing Predator cast member (and Lethal Weapon screenwriter) Shane Black back to write and direct a new sequel sounded like the best idea ever, and then Black sweetened the deal by having his The Monster Squad collaborator Fred Dekker write the script with him. Unfortunately, the wild ideas and goofball tone Black and Dekker brought to their film just didn’t work for the franchise. There’s a Predator on the run (Brian A. Prince) that crash-lands on Earth, where it’s captured by the government and its gear ends up in the hands of U.S. Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook), who inadvertently passes it over to his autistic son Rory (Jacob Tremblay). There’s also an Upgrade Predator (Kyle Strauts doing mo-cap for a CGI monstrosity) that has been juicing with DNA harvested from its prey and enhancing itself with tech implants, and it wants cargo the other Predator had on its ship. It also takes an interest in Rory because it sees his autism as an advancement in human evolution. Aided by an evolutionary biologist (Olivia Munn) and a group of soldiers dealing with PTSD (Trevante Rhodes, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, August Aguilera), McKenna fights to keep his kid safe from Predators and government agents (headed by Sterling K. Brown). The cast is solid, the characters are fun and likeable, and there’s some cool action. But The Predator is an odd, silly movie, and it’s packed with questionable decisions. Some were there from the start, as Black and Dekker didn’t seem to understand the Predators, and some were the result of reshoots that changed the third act.

AVP: ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (2004)

The same year fans spotted the Easter egg of an alien xenomorph skull on the trophy wall in the hunter’s space ship in Predator 2, Dark Horse Comics published the first Aliens vs. Predator comic book series. Fans wanted to see this idea brought to the screen, but while multiple comic books, video games, and novels explored the crossover concept (it was a 1994 AVP novel by Steve Perry that named the Predator species Yautja), a cinematic take on it was stuck in development hell. And when writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson and co-writer Shane Salerno finally gave us an AVP movie, it was nothing like the one fans had been imagining. Who ever expected the story to take place on modern day Earth, in an underground pyramid on an island off the coast of Antarctica? That’s where Anderson and Salerno set it, while revealing that the Predators were the Ancient Aliens that helped humanity get rolling – and for thousands of years, they’ve been bringing xenomorphs to Earth for a rite of passage ritual that takes place every one hundred years. When the pyramid fires up for the 2004 edition, Weyland Corporation founder Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) assembles a team of scientists and mercenaries (plus Sanaa Lathan as heroine Lex Woods) to check it out, and they arrive just in time to get caught up in the battle. We thought an AVP movie would be an epic, but the confined setting, bland characters, cheesy dialogue, and underwhelming action make this one a B-level creature feature. It does deliver some goofy monster mash fun, but an Alien vs. Predator movie should have been better than this.

PREDATOR: BADLANDS (2025)

For decades, writers of Predator comic books and novels have been building out the world of the Yautja, but little of that information ever made it into the movies. Now that the franchise is in the hands of director Dan Trachtenberg, who has dug into some of the extended lore, that’s finally starting to get worked in. “Yautja” is now film-confirmed canon and a language has even been developed for the alien species. This was necessary because, with his third addition to the franchise (and Prey writer Patrick Aison’s second), Trachtenberg gave us a Predator movie that’s unlike any we’ve seen before: an epic sci-fi adventure film where a Predator is the protagonist. Dek ( played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is the runt of his clan and marked for death by his father, so he goes to the dangerous planet Genna to hunt a supposedly unkillable creature called the Kalisk. Along the way, he picks up a “tool” that will help him traverse this dangerous territory: a damaged but surprisingly cheerful and chatty Weyland-Yutani synth called Thia (Elle Fanning). There’s also a little creature that starts hanging out with them, and Thia names it Bud. There are no humans in the film, but there’s plenty of action, all of it involving Dek and his companions tearing through alien creatures or cutting up synths. This resulted in a PG-13 rating, and going along with that is a lighter tone than the average Predator flick. Predator: Badlands is a really cool, fun movie, but it’s very different from the other entries in the franchise. It’s ranked lower here simply because this sort of alien-populated sci-fi adventure is less appealing to my personal taste than the harder-edged Predator-hunting-humans entries.

PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS (2025)

Dan Trachtenberg’s 1719-set Prey left fans eager to see more Predator movies that were set throughout history, and Trachtenberg certainly delivered with his second Predator movie, the animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers, which was written by Micho Robert Rutare. This one packs three different historical Predator stories (plus one where the characters collide) into 80 minutes, meaning we get four stories that are all killer (appropriate, given the title), with as little filler as possible, The least interesting thing about some of these movies are the extended build-ups to the Predator action, and that’s not something you need to worry about very much in this one. Each historical story takes time to introduce its lead character(s) and show them in action, then the Predator shows up to ruin their day. So Killer of Killers is a great option to turn to when you’re in the mood for a quick fix of action. Trachtenberg also likes to give us things we haven’t seen before in the franchise, and he did that in several ways here. We get Predators battling Vikings, samurai and a shinobi, and taking part in an aerial fight during World War II. The final segment seems to draw inspiration from Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 Predators script, with a gladiator match and hovercraft, but makes the situation work better than it did in that script. It is kind of weird that each of the lead characters manages to kill a Predator within maybe fifteen minutes of realizing these things exist, but that goes hand-in-hand with the fact that these are short stories that need to get through the scenario rather quickly. So don’t question that part of it, just sit back and enjoy the show.

PREY (2022)

A lot of viewers enjoyed Predators, but it still took eight years for The Predator to come along – and that movie was so poorly received, it wouldn’t have been surprising if the franchise had been put on ice for several years after that. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. In fact, director Dan Trachtenberg and writer Patrick Aison were already getting Prey in motion while The Predator was in production! Fans had long been talking about the potential of Predator movies that would be set throughout history, and that’s exactly what Trachtenberg and Aison delivered here, giving us a back-to-basics story set in 1719 (and, in the process, providing a back story for the antique pistol seen at the end of Predator 2; a different back story than the one that had already been told in a comic book). Amber Midthunder stars as a young Comanche woman named Naru, who has been trained as a healer but she dreams of becoming a great hunter. She gets her chance when a Predator (Dane DiLiegro) drops down onto the Great Plains and starts searching for the most dangerous game in the land. This is his first hunt and apparently no one gave him a heads-up about humans, because he starts out killing snakes, wolves, and bears. Prey features some great Predator-on-human action, but it takes a long time to get there and the build-up doesn’t lend itself to rewatchability as much as the build-up in some of the other movies (especially the first) does. It’s worth the wait, though, especially when we get to watch the Predator slash and smash his way through a group of French fur trappers.

PREDATORS (2010)

In 1996, Robert Rodriguez wrote a really bad Predator sequel script that brought back Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character from the first film but disregarded character continuity, taking him on a futuristic interplanetary adventure that involved multi-species gladiatorial games run by the Predators – and the script got them all wrong, too. So that project was wisely shelved for over a decade, until the studio decided to circle back and have Rodriguez produce a new Predator film. Thankfully, the script was given a complete overhaul by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, so the story director Nimrod Antal brought to the screen was quite different from what Rodriguez originally wrote. And much better. The film is packed with nods to the first movie and tells of a group of people who have confirmed kills (they’re mercenaries, soldiers, criminals, etc.) being abducted and dropped onto an alien planet the Predators use as a gaming preserve. Adrien Brody, Alice Braga, Topher Grace, Walton Goggins, Danny Trejo, Oleg Taktarov, Mahershala Ali, Louis Ozawa Changchien, and Laurence Fishburne have to fight for their lives while being tracked by a trio of “Super Predators” (played by two actors, Brian Steele and Carey Jones) and their “falcon” and “dogs.” A fourth Predator, a “Classic Predator” played by Derek Mears, is also in the mix, and we learn that the Classic Predators have a blood feud with the Super Predators. Not sure why the filmmakers felt that was necessary, but okay, we’ll go along with it. Predators is a fine sequel and was a strong return to form after the letdown of the AVP movies.

PREDATOR 2 (1990)

Predator 2 is a surprisingly gutsy sequel. While viewers often complain that sequels just deliver “more of the same,” this one goes in a completely different direction than its predecessor, moving the setting from the jungle to Los Angeles in 1997 (the future!). The city is being hit by a heatwave and there’s a war being waged on its streets between rival drug cartels; Colombians on one side, Jamaicans on the other, and the L.A.P.D. caught in the middle. Heat and conflict, just how the Predator likes it. Schwarzenegger stayed away due to a pay dispute, so producer Joel Silver brought in his Lethal Weapon star Danny Glover to play Lieutenant Mike R. Harrigan, the sort of cop who doesn’t play by the rules and handles tough situations by doing things that are crazy but heroic. Harrigan and fellow cops played by Bill Paxton, María Conchita Alonso, and Rubén Blades are on the case as the Predator starts blasting and slashing its way through the drug gangs – and their investigation causes them to butt heads with a government agent played by Gary Busey, whose team knows these alien hunters exist and is tracking the new one around the city. Directed by Stephen Hopkins from a script by Jim and John Thomas, Predator 2 is a great sequel that takes a different approach (and feels free to get damn weird at times) while still connecting to the first movie and continuing the story in some ways. It pits the creature (played by Kevin Peter Hall) against another terrific cast, features some awesome action sequences, and deepens the Predator mythology – while giving the hunter some really cool new weapons to use on its prey.

PREDATOR (1987)

Not only is the original the best film in the Predator franchise, it’s also one of the best blends of sci-fi, action, and horror ever made. The story from first-time screenwriters Jim and John Thomas involves a paramilitary rescue team being tricked by a CIA agent into taking out some Soviet-funded guerrillas in a Central American jungle. Director John McTiernan assembled an awesome group of larger-than-life men of action to bring the team to life – and for the opening stretch of the film, it seems like it’s just another badass Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick along the lines of Commando… except for the fact that it starts with a shot of a space ship and the team is being watched by something using infrared vision. It’s not until the guerrilla situation has been handled that this thing, an alien creature that (according to a local played by Elpidia Carrillo) visits this jungle to hunt humans during the hottest years, starts picking off the team members one by one. When characters played by the likes of Carl Weathers, Sonny Landham, Jesse Ventura, Bill Duke, Richard Chaves, and Shane Black can’t stand up to something, it really drives home how capable this alien is. It’s all extremely cool and the film is expertly crafted, but the whole endeavor would have fallen apart if the Predator didn’t look as great as it does. The initial “Jean-Claude Van Damme insect monster” version of the creature could have ruined the movie. Thankfully, Stan Winston was brought in to save the day and, with Kevin Peter Hall putting on the monster suit Winston created, Predator brought us a new genre icon.

What do you think of this Predator Movies Ranked list? How would you rank the movies? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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