Movies
‘Predator: Badlands’ Is Now Officially Rated PG-13 for “Strong Sci-fi Violence”
There’s been a lot of talk in the horror community recently about Predator: Badlands being rated PG-13, but the film hadn’t actually been rated by the MPA until this week. Interviews with the filmmakers that were pulled from set visits had led many to believe that Badlands would likely be released with a PG-13, and we can now officially confirm that to be the case.
Predator: Badlands has been rated PG-13 by the MPA this week for “sequences of strong sci-fi violence,” making it the very first solo Predator movie to be released with a PG-13 rating.
Outside of the Alien vs. Predator mashup movie, the core Predator franchise has always been a rated R affair, and director Dan Trachtenberg’s two contributions thus far – Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers – have carried that very rating. But the good news here is that Predator: Badlands is really only a PG-13 movie due to the fact that there are no humans in the movie.
That means all the violence in the movie is creature-on-creature or android-related. The MPA is historically more accepting of the violent dispatching of non-humans, with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn being a particularly notable example of the horror hack of using non-red blood. The monsters in the film bleed green, which allowed for Dusk Till Dawn to push the boundaries of bloodshed without being slapped with a higher rating.
With only monsters and androids being dispatched in Predator: Badlands, the film should be able to remain a violent Predator movie within the confines of the PG-13 classification. And Trachtenberg’s idea from the very beginning was indeed for the film to be a PG-13 affair, so this isn’t a case of a rated R movie being reduced to a PG-13 rating by the studio.
As producer Ben Rosenblatt explained to Bloody Disgusting during our visit to the Predator: Badlands set, “We don’t have any humans in the movie, and so we don’t have any human red blood. We’re hoping that’s going to play to our advantage. Which is a way of answering your question, how hard are we going to go?
“We’re going to go as hard as we possibly can within those constraints, and we think we’ll be able to do some pretty awesomely gruesome stuff, but colors other than red.“
Predator: Badlands will release in theaters on November 7, 2025, in IMAX, Dolby Cinema, RealD 3D, Cinemark XD, 4DX, ScreenX, and premium screens everywhere.
Watch the brand new international trailer below.
Before updating the video nasty Faces of Death, director Daniel Goldhaber and writer Isa Mazzei explored the dangers of online life in tech-thriller Cam, their feature debut that was acquired by Netflix in 2018 after making waves on the festival circuit.
At the end of last year, the Netflix exclusive quietly departed from the streaming platform, left without another streaming home.
It’s not an isolated story; Mike Flanagan’s Hush also left streaming entirely for a period until it was finally picked up on both physical media and other streaming services.
While the tech-thriller currently isn’t available to watch on Netflix, Tubi, Hulu, or any other platforms, that’s not a problem for Cam thanks to a very cool move by Goldhaber: the director has made his breakout film accessible to watch online for free via his website.
As his site notes: “CAM is unfortunately not currently available to view on any platforms, so you can watch it here if you like :).“
No subscriptions or fees necessary, just hit play.
Cam follows Alice (Madeline Brewer), who works as an online cam girl obsessed with her ranking on the cam site. The higher her ranking goes, the more it draws unwanted attention, and Alice soon finds herself replaced on her own show with a doppelganger.
Written by Mazzei, a former camgirl, it uses the horror thriller premise to examine the life of a sex worker; Alice’s career ambition is directly at odds with the shame it brings to her family, and how she tries to spare them from it by keeping them in the dark. It only compounds her danger when the doppelganger enters the equation in Goldhaber’s engaging thriller.
For a deep dive into the treacherous world of Cam, listen to Horror Queers’ episode on it now.
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