Obviously, you’re about to read massive spoilers for The Predator.

With a 36% score on Rotten Tomatoes and an opening weekend box office of around $24 million domestically, it seems Shane Black’s The Predator may once again be the last installment in the franchise for a while. After all, Predators had a similar box office performance in it opening weekend, and the franchise then disappeared for eight years.

A bummer, because The Predator is a whole lot of fun. Honestly, it’s the most straight up fun horror movie I’ve seen on the big screen in the last several years, in many ways feeling like a throwback to a different time in the genre’s history. Nonstop entertaining and as bloody as it is laugh-out-loud funny, Black’s latest is hands down the franchise’s best sequel to date.

This coming from someone who also loved Predators, for what that’s worth.

So about that ending…

In the final moments of The Predator, after defeating the “Ultimate Predator,” take-no-shit hero Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is introduced to the “Predator Killer,” which we had been wondering about the entire film. Long story short, we were told it was *something* a rogue, somewhat benevolent Predator had been on a mission to deliver to us lowly humans on Earth, which would help thwart an impending takeover from his Predator homeboys. As it turns out, that something is an Iron Man-like nanotechnology Predator suit, which will essentially allow Quinn to become a human-Predator hybrid in the eventual battle between Predators and humans. A battle we may never see, given the under-performance of The Predator.

If you were thinking the “Predator Killer” was going to be Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Dutch Schaefer, well, you weren’t alone. In fact, that was essentially the original plan for the ending.

Birth.Movies.Death. got their hands on an early draft of Shane Black and Fred Dekker’s script for The Predator, which ended with the franchise return of the original “Predator Killer”!

The site details that original ending…

McKenna, his son, Rory (Jacob Tremblay) and Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn) have all just survived the final attack of the Super Predator (referred to as “The Upgrade” in the script) when a helicopter lands. Out climbs…Dutch Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), his “face haunted; etched by pain.” Dutch tells the trio to come with him, and when Rory asks, “Uh…me, too?”, the franchise’s second-most iconic badass smiles and say, “Especially you.”

Funny enough, an original ending for Predators had a similar scene, which was set to bring Dutch back into the franchise. The reason Schwarzenegger declined the cameo appearance in The Predator, which could’ve set up a starring role in a potential sequel? Simple enough, as Black explained last week, the cameo appearance just wasn’t a meaty enough role.

“The studio wanted a fresher movie that featured an evolving cast,” Black explained. “They didn’t want to hinge the movie on the re-emergence of Schwarzenegger. It would probably be more of a matter of his showing up briefly and just participating at the very end, at the climax of the movie.”

Black continued, “Understandably – and believe me, I completely get it – he said, ‘Look, that’s kind of a small part, and I don’t really think I want to do that. I’m off to do Terminator with Jim Cameron, basically. Or for Jim Cameron’.”

As cool as it would’ve been for Dutch to have emerged from that pod, was anyone else thinking it was gonna be a Xenomorph?! Now THAT would’ve been a killer twist for the ages!

(That said, I’m 100% all-in for Holbrook as Iron Man Predator. Sue me.)