Director Shane Black has been with the Predator franchise since its inception, having starred in the original film as the soldier Hawkins. After more than 30 years away, Black returns to the saga to direct The Predator, which he joked he did to stave off a mid-life crisis.
"The whole point of it was the nostalgia of, at first, just wanting to go back to a time which was particularly magical," the filmmaker shared with The Rundown. "I was 20-something years old, I had Lethal Weapon going on, and The Monster Squad, and then the Predator, and it was just such a great period of being green and anxious and wide-eyed and not having really done any of it before. Now, here, I'm in my 50s now and I felt like a mid-life crisis coming on, so I called my friend Fred Dekker, who wrote The Monster Squad, and I said, 'Do you wanna maybe be like a kid again?'"
he Predator lands in theaters on September 14th.