Shane Black’s The Predator wasn’t great, and its eponymous alien absolutely could not have killed John Wick, but it sounds like we dodged a super weird bullet when an alternate ending was scrapped after being shot. In the version of the film that was released, the ending involves some of the surviving characters pulling some cargo from a crashed Predator ship, with the biggest trophy being a transforming “Predator killer” suit that would’ve presumably put mankind on equal footing with the ugly motherfuckers if Black ever got a chance to make a sequel. Now, according to special effects artist Yuri Everson, the crew shot three different versions of the ending that all involved different “Predator killers” that would’ve been in the pod.
Everson says—along with photographic proof that you can see below—that one of the variations would’ve featured the humans opening up some kind of pod to reveal none other than Alien series protagonist Ellen Ripley, with her face conveniently covered by a Weyland-Yutani-branded breathing mask that was designed to look like one of the facehuggers from Alien (though the mask was apparently modified on-set to make it look less like a facehugger). It’s well-established that the Predator and Alien movies take place in the same universe, but the problem with this is that The Predator takes place on present-day Earth while Ellen Ripley isn’t even born until 2092. That means a The Predator sequel that followed this scrapped ending would’ve required the introduction of time travel and some kind of justification for why dedicated Xenomorph killer Ellen Ripley had suddenly become a Yautja killer.
Meanwhile, this reveal also probably gives us a hint of what Black was planning with the cameo that Arnold Schwarzenegger turned down. After all, a guy who famously killed a Predator would’ve made a better “Predator killer” than a suit or a woman who has—to the best of our knowledge—never killed a Predator.