The success of Dan Trachtenberg’s 2022 Predator movie Prey seems to have been a wake-up call for 20th Century Studios, a reminder both that there was still life in the franchise, and that approaching it in a way audiences had never seen before could pay off. The studio effectively handed the franchise over to Trachtenberg, who co-wrote and co-directed the animated movie Predator: Killer of Killers, hitting Hulu on June 6, and directed Predator: Badlands, a Nov. 2025 movie that turns a young Predator into a protagonist.
While Trachtenberg is obviously drawing heavily on his own Predator franchise fandom, we weren’t expecting to talk to him about Killer of Killers
“I haven’t thought about this for a while,” Trachtenberg told Polygon via Zoom. “But Best in Show was very much a part of [my thinking] when we were making it. Because in that movie, being a comedy, you bond with the characters in a very unique way. And when you get to the end, you realize, Wait, I don’t want [any of them to beat the others]. It’s not like any other sports movie, where you have your protagonist, and you’re rooting for them to win.”
Best in Show follows a group of entrants and other peripheral characters at the Mayflower Dog Show, a competitive pageant full of eccentrics and dog obsessives. Predator: Killer of Killers, for its part, follows three characters from three different eras: a Viking raider obsessed with avenging her father’s murderer, a Japanese nobleman who becomes a ninja to defend his honor from his samurai brother, and a World War II pilot with a knack for machinery. Each of them faces a Predator in their own era and homeland; each in turn is then preserved to fight a final battle for a Predator audience.
Trachtenberg isn’t pointing at specific story parallels between the two movies — just an overall sense of structure he admired in Best in Show.
“It’s like — wait, I like that person. I like that person. I like that person. — I don’t want anyone to be the winner!” he says. “And so that was the fun of [Killer of Killers]. If you bond with all three of them, you don’t want any of them to beat each other.”
As far as the animated look of the movie goes, though, he says he and co-director Joshua Wassung learned more from Netflix’s animated series Arcane. Where Arcane was made with familiar digital animation industry programs like Maya and Nuke, though, Killer of Killers was designed in Unreal Engine.
“That’s one of the unique things about it — to be start to finish in Unreal is pretty special,” Trachtenberg says. “Arcane was a big reference, and we did have some artists from that series.” Most notably, Steven J. Meyer, credited as Arcane’s lead animator, was Trachtenberg and Wassung’s head of character animation.
But ultimately, Trachtenberg says, the non-Predator movie he was thinking about most when making Killer of Killers was Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s 1988 anime classic Akira. Again, that wasn’t about specific story parallels — it was about how Akira made Trachtenberg feel when he first encountered it as a kid.
“I distinctly remember I was way too young to see it, and I convinced my mom to buy it for me,” he says. “It had a parental advisory sticker on it — at Suncoast, they didn’t let you buy the movie unless there was someone old enough [with you]. So I convinced my mom — she thought it was just a cartoon, it’d be fine.”
Trachtenberg’s mother clearly wasn’t aware that Akira starts with an intense street war between biker gangs, and goes on to include a wide variety of violence, from a trippy, surrealist dream attack to the brutal death of a young woman. “It really blew my mind, for obvious reasons,” Trachtenberg says. “One thing was just how emotionally intense it was. I don’t think I’d seen very many movies that were that adult thematically at the age I was, on top of action like I had never [seen before].”
He describes his response to the end of that opening bike chase as, “I can’t believe I just saw what I saw, and that it moved the way it moved, and felt the way it felt.” That response, he says, was a major reason he wanted Killer of Killers to be animated.
“There are certain things you can only get away with if they’re animated,” he says. “So that was more the inspiration — trying to recapture that feeling, and simultaneously make it very cinematic, just as I would any live action movie, and be classical in many ways. But moment to moment, to indulge in the animation. I certainly wouldn’t, in a live-action movie, stick a guy on the wing of a plane, trying to fix it in a mid-air battle, or do a trench run through the streets of Casablanca. I think it would be a little goofy in live action. But animated, it’s so whimsical and fun. And all the gore and the violence — to express that the way we do, that was really the draw and the inspiration. It was really just indulging in it all.”
Predator: Killer of Killers debuts on Hulu on June 6.
