Just last November, word broke that 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg was quietly at work developing a mysterious new movie set in the Predator universe. Now Collider has talked to producer John Davis, who revealed not only details of the film, currently called Skull, but also that it's already shooting.
Yes, with nary a word on casting, location or even storyline, the film is already underway, with Trachtenberg already reportedly three-quarters of the way through filming.
The main character this time – beyond the alien creature, of course – will be a woman who encounters a Predator on its first journey to Earth, the story taking place before the original film.
"It goes back to what made the original Predator movie work," says Davis. "It's the ingenuity of a human being who won't give up, who's able to observe and interpret, basically being able to beat a stronger, more powerful, well-armed force.
"It actually has more akin to The Revenant than it does any film in the Predator canon. You'll know what I mean once you see it. You can use your imagination. It is... early."
And this has been in the works since at least 2017, when Shane Black was at work on The Predator. "Dan came to me with a writer [Patrick Aison] and an idea while we were shooting the movie," Davis recalls. "Emma Watts [then president of production at Fox] was really instrumental here. She said, 'you know what, let's go put this into development now and let's push on this now. Let's go for this now.' We couldn't be shooting one movie and prepping another, especially when one was the current-day end of the franchise and the other was the period beginning of the franchise. So it was always done with a lot of secrecy. It just continued to be something that's going to be out there to surprise you." For more on the film, head to Collider.
There's no word on a release date yet, but we could be seeing something from the film sooner rather than later...