Consistent inconsistency has defined the Predator franchise ever since Arnold Schwarzenegger and his band of manly men first came up against a dreadlocked intergalactic bounty hunter in the classic 1987 original, but the best continuation of the bunch didn’t even manage to get a solitary sequel.
Nimrod Antal and Robert Rodriguez’s Predators is a quantifiable success whichever way you try to look at it, so the fact 20th Century Fox didn’t deem additional installments worth its time is a real head-scratcher. A $127 million haul at the box office on a $40 million budget made it the highest-grossing standalone entry in the series, while a 65 percent Rotten Tomatoes score marked it out as the best film featuring the titular aliens in any capacity that wasn’t John McTiernan’s opener.
Throw in an additional $22 million from home video sales in the United States alone, and it was a massively profitable enterprise, with the writing team concocting plans for follow-ups that never came. Instead, Shane Black’s The Predator rebooted again and tanked hard, while Dan Trachtenberg’s acclaimed Prey didn’t even see the inside of a theater.
Predators has long since cemented its reputation as the one that got away among those with a fondness for the IP, but it can always be relied upon to capture imaginations on streaming, regardless of which platform it can be viewed. Proving that point yet again, Rakuten subscribers are the latest to take the legacy sequel to their hearts per FlixPatrol, even if they’ll end up lamenting it’s one-and-done status just like the rest of us.