The only true sequel in a 7-film franchise stuck in a 30-year cycle of endless fresh starts takes to the streets on streaming

It’s ludicrous that a franchise seven films deep and over 35 years in only contains one direct sequel in amongst an endless sea of reboots, but that’s exactly what makes Predator 2 stand out from the pack.

Stephen Hopkins’ severely underrated cult favorite picks up a decade after the events of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s classic original, with Danny Glover marshaling the action in the far-flung future of… 1997. It’s directly tied to the DNA of its predecessor, which is something that can’t be said of any other installment in the iconic sci-fi saga.

Robert Rodriguez and Nimrod Antal’s Predators was a standalone story that really should have gotten at least one follow-up if the world was a fair place, while Shane Black ironically ended up cutting the sole piece of direct connective tissue out of The Predator when Jake Busey’s Sean Keyes wasn’t even confirmed to be the son of father Gary’s Predator 2 scenery-chewer Peter in the theatrical cut.

Prey does get a pass for taking place hundreds of years in the past, but Paul W.S. Anderson’s turgid Alien vs. Predator told its own story, before that ended up being discarded in favor of the significantly worse Requiem. In essence, we’ve gotten five brand new additions to the mythology since Predator 2 released over three decades ago, and not a single one of them is a straightforward follow-up, which is nuts.

Of course, it doesn’t matter when Predator 2 still rules as hard as ever, with FlixPatrol revealing that iTunes subscribers are the latest to either rediscover or find out that fact for the very first time, seeing as it’s one of the platform’s top-ranked titles this weekend.