It’s a long-standing Comic-Con tradition: While the sweat-soaked masses cram into San Diego’s fabled Hall H to get rewarded for their bladder-testing diligence with exclusive clips and actor banter, the rest of us poor plebes are forced to wait on the outside, listening at the door in secondhand awe at how cool these ivory tower trailers must be. Now, all we can do is share our envy at the descriptions coming out of this afternoon’s panel for Shane Black’s long-gestating The Predator, full of macho banter, conversations about whether John Wick could take down an alien hunter—in his sleep, we say—and the apparent sight of a smaller Predator getting ripped apart by a bigger, “’roided” one.
Yep, it sounds like performance-enhancing drugs might have finally come to the world of intergalactic trophy killing. (Damn you, Lance Armstrong!) As noted by Black, several decades of defeats at the hands of Earth’s beefiest men have apparently dinged the self-esteem of the Yautja people, forcing them to chemically adapt to our all-powerful one-liners and various Dannys Glover. Meanwhile, Black also showed off clips of his cast joking around and falling in sync with each other, plus some footage of the team of heavily-armed misfits—Boyd Holbrook, Sterling K. Brown, Keegan-Michael Key, Trevante Rhodes, Jake Busey, Thomas Jane and Augusto Aguiliera—vaguely menacing Olivia Munn’s biologist character. (Don’t worry, she tries to shoot them for it.)
Again, though, the big takeaway here—and with apologies to Black, who tried to stump for his personal creation by saying “I don’t think there’s a single option that’s been discussed that would actually win against this Predator”—is that there was even a question among the film’s stars about whether the Predator could take John Wick in a fight. (They also discussed poor, doomed Han Solo, Ash from Evil Dead, and obvious winner Ellen Ripley from Alien.) He’s fucking Baba Yaga, people; it doesn’t matter how many cloaking devices or bad-sportsman nukes you’ve got, the dude only needs some office supplies to put you in an interplanetary grave.
[via The Hollywood Reporter and USA Today]