It’s no secret that Shane Black’s The Predator didn’t exactly arrive on screen as the movie Black and Fred Dekker originally wrote, with the final act in particular being re-shot to take the characters into the woods at night for a battle with the Ultimate Predator. The ending they originally scripted had included two benevolent “Emissary Predators” and a menagerie of hybrid creatures that we’ve only seen glimpses of through concept art, and in a chat with Moviefone last week, Dekker finally laid out the full original ending in his own words.

Dekker told the site, “We had devised a sequence, which I confessed was my idea, which was essentially, our heroes have to get from point A to point B and they commandeer military convoy. And at that point in the film, we had established a pair of Predator emissaries, basically good guy predators. What was interesting to Shane and I was to ask a question that nobody [seems] to give a shit about, which is, what do predators do, except for hunt? Because they’ve invented interstellar spacecraft. So they’re not stupid. They’re not just a bunch of Arkansas rednecks who come to Earth to play the most dangerous game. They actually have a civilization and a culture. And presumably that’s worth exploring since none of the other movies do it.”

He continued…

“So our idea was that their planet is dying. And so they’ve decided to take what previously was explored, which is to dope up creatures with the DNA of other types of predators from alien worlds and create new targets for their hunt. But now they realized, well, hey, we need maybe to upgrade ourselves just to survive. And then they go to themselves, well, hey, earth is warming up. We like a warm environment. Maybe we should move in. So the premise of the movie is that in the third act was these two predators come aboard the ship and everybody’s freaking out and the predators actually want to communicate. They want to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a problem, you have a problem. Maybe we should team up’.”

“So that whole convoy was trying to get the emissaries to the ship to get away and they were going to be chased by A, the upgrade who we meet in the finished version of the movie and B, and this was a huge change from our initial premise, is that at the beginning of the movie, you see the first Predator that shows up in the movie. He leaves the ship and we push in on this container in the ship. And what they ended up with was the terrible ending that I have nothing to do with it. Shane didn’t write either. That was sort of someone decided it was a good idea.”

“There’s something on the ship. Well, originally there was a whole bunch of those in the ship. And what those were was those were the gestating hybrids. Essentially what they were nurturing and growing in these pods were the hybrids of Predator DNA mixed with the DNA of creatures from all over the galaxy that would enable them to basically eradicate mankind so that they could populate it themselves. And so the convoy chase, the idea was that it would be all of our heroes on these badass, big military vehicles and the upgrade releases the hybrids and chases them and the hybrids jump onto the convoy. And it’s a big, rootin’, tootin’ fantastic action sequence.”

“Shane storyboarded it. And we had a pre-viz and animatics and it was I think a really cool idea. At some point or another, the studio, I think, and I’m not pointing fingers at anyone in particular, but there were these misgivings that we were straying too far from what people expected the movie to be. And so we sat down and went, ‘I guess we need to do a hunt and it needs to be at night, so it’s scarier.’ So we ended up going in that direction, which I don’t think served us because it didn’t top anything we’d seen before. I’m actually quite pleased with the first half of the movie, but it kind of goes off the rails by, and Hollywood does this all the time by, trying to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.”

“I think that the convoy chase should have been done at night to be scarier. And I argued for it, but I was just the co-writer, if I’d been a producer on the movie, they would have listened to me more. But believe it or not, that’s the short version of how it became what it is.”

Dekker also touched upon the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger was asked to make a cameo at the end of the movie but turned it down, and that alternate endings were filmed involving both Ellen Ripley and Aliens character Newt. Ultimately, of course, what emerges from the cocoon isn’t a character but rather the “Predator Killer” suit for Boyd Holbook’s character.

Needless to say, The Predator was something of a total mess behind the scenes, but I stand by what I wrote back in December: it was the most unfairly hated horror movie of 2018.

Even if I’m alone on an island, I truly do love that movie.