“When you can’t afford the fight you promised, animate it.”

Woke to a disturbance in the Force as I saw the trailer for Hulu’s pending release of Predator: Killer of Killers—and right out the gate, that name is atrocious. It sounds like a forgotten early-2000s FPS or a straight-to-DVD sequel they buried behind a convenience store. Surely, surely we could have done better. Predator: Bloodlines. Predator: Epoch. Predator: Hunt Eternal. Anything but this.

But I digress.

The trailer opens with a shimmer in a fortress being buttoned up just in time for a camouflaged Predator to face down a squad of samurai warriors. And for a brief, fleeting moment, I got excited. Because this exact concept has been floating around fan circles since Prey dropped.

The pitch was pure genre gold: A disgraced samurai, having failed to protect his daimyo, refuses seppuku and instead pursues the Predator responsible for his master’s death. A hunt for redemption. A clash of honor codes. A slow-burn duel in the mist.

It’s the kind of logline you sell an entire movie on.

But no, don’t get excited. They didn’t go there.

Instead, we’re served a grab bag of shorts, leaping across time like a Predator-powered Quantum Leap. The trailer jumps from a Viking campfire tale, where old warriors speak of a returning demon, to a WWII dogfight, where a fighter pilot gets shot out of the sky—by a cloaked Predator in a spacecraft, no less. Stylish? Absolutely. Grounded? Less so.

What we’re actually getting is an anthology triptych in the style of Love, Death and Robots or Secret Level—vignettes across history showing how Earth has always been Predator’s favorite murder-based theme park. Some of it looks amazing. Some of it looks… like a pitch deck on a deadline. That’s the curse of anthologies: wild highs, awkward lows, and one or two entries that make you wish the whole thing had just been that.

Credit where it’s due, though: the producers got Prey’s Dan Trachtenberg to return, riding the credibility that film earned. And while Prey wasn’t a box office monster, it had weight, vision, and a sense of cultural grounding that made it matter. This time, Trachtenberg brings us three new chapters:

• Predator vs Samurai
• Predator vs Vikings
• Predator vs WWII pilots

The animation house, The Third Floor, is aiming high, drawing inspiration from Blue Eye Samurai and Arcane. And you can feel it—this isn’t cookie-cutter Netflix sludge (though the danger is always there). They’re trying to craft a distinct visual identity across eras, matching the energy and savagery of each story’s setting.

The official synopsis reads:

“The anthology story follows three of the fiercest warriors in human history: a Viking raider guiding her young son on a bloody quest for revenge; a ninja in feudal Japan who turns against his Samurai brother in a brutal battle for succession; and a WWII pilot who takes to the sky to investigate an otherworldly threat to the Allied cause. But while all these warriors are killers in their own right, they are merely prey for their new opponent — the ultimate killer of killers.”

(Still hate that title.)

So here’s the truth:
I don’t think they had a strong enough script to make Predator vs Samurai work in live-action. They couldn’t justify the cost. Not even with the goodwill earned by Prey.

A full-scale period piece with practical effects and a big R-rated gamble? Not in this economy. And so: Animation is the test kitchen.

It lets them stay brutal. Stay fast. Stay weird. It gives them a way to probe the fandom—see what lands, see what trends, see which story gets the call-up to the majors. It’s not evolution. It’s containment. A calculated risk instead of a full-tilt hunt.

Is this a killing blow?
Not every hunt needs to be live-action. But if you’re going to call it Killer of Killers, it better strike deeper than concept art and nostalgia. I’m watching—but I’m watching with a blade in my hand.

On June 6, Predator: Killer of Killers arrives on Hulu and with #HuluOnDisneyPlus.