Director Shane Black’s latest film, THE NICE GUYS, may have just hit theaters, but he already has two other big franchises on his plate: DOC SAVAGE, and THE PREDATOR. The latter film is obviously a part of the same franchise that spawned two sequels and two ALIEN VS. PREDATOR films, but none were as well received as the first one.

With THE PREDATOR, Black hopes to bring some credibility back to the dormant franchise. The director has given us little tidbits here and there for months. He’s teased Arnold Schwarzenegger’s involvement and the overall setting, but has been pretty coy on specifics.

In a recent Q&A podcast interview with Empire, the director gave another bit of insight into the film, all while taking a little stab at the current generation of fans as well as sites like us:

“The hero of the new one, the name I’ve given the guy in PREDATOR right now is Quinn Mackenna. And that may change. We live in a culture where everyone’s like, ‘[I want to] know everything about it before it comes out, and I want to be able to see every moment, and i’m gonna go back and forth on the goddamn YouTube channel and get every goddamn moment and every Easter egg.’ [But] I’ll tell you a little bit about it. It’s an attempt to event-ize the PREDATOR and make it more mysterious. THE PREDATOR has been so overdone in a way – very low budget with a guaranteed return, every couple of years there’s a knock off churned out. It’s gotta get to the point where people buy their tickets in advance instead of saying, ‘Oh honey look, another Predator movie. Nah, no, Adam Sandler’s got this thing on TV let’s do that instead.’ I want people to say, ‘The Predator is coming, I know it’s coming, we want to see it, it’s mysterious, interesting, it’s got the same sense of wonderment and newness that CLOSE ENCOUNTERS had when that came out.’ That’s what we want. That’s very impossible to achieve, but we’re going to try.”

Sounds really promising. A few months back, Black had mentioned his desire to turn THE PREDATOR back into an “event film” status, rather than have it rest in the B-movie tier it’s resided in for a while. As far as what the actual genre of the film will be, well that still seems to be up in the air (along with the main character’s name), as he has yet to finish the script.

“It’s still in the hopper, I never finished it. It was supposed to be time travel done as horror, and I couldn’t figure out the time travel of it, it got too confusing for me. But I’ll still go back to it. I love the idea of time travel as horror, but I can’t keep my head straight when I’m trying to write it. I keep violating my own rules.”

Well, Black certainly has a bit of time. The film isn’t due for another couple years, and as much, he probably has another half-year or so to get that script where it needs to be before jumping into pre-production. Usually in a big budget film, studios start principal photography around a year ahead of the release schedule, so it doesn’t seem like he should be sweating just yet, but I’ll be interested to see how much things change between here and now. Should the hero’s name change, it’ll be an interesting little piece of trivia for fans.

What do you think of Black’s comments? Let us know in the comments down below! Also, take a listen to the full interview below!

THE PREDATOR is currently slated to hit theaters on March 2, 2018.

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SOURCE: Empire (via Dark Horizons)