Hollywood's Colonial Gaze: Predator Franchise Sidelines African Stories Again
As Hollywood celebrates another blockbuster success with Predator: Badlands, earning $80 million globally in its opening weekend, the entertainment industry continues its troubling pattern of extracting profits from African-inspired narratives while systematically excluding African voices from the creative process.
Director Dan Trachtenberg's latest installment in the Predator franchise has broken records, becoming the highest-grossing opening for any Predator film. Yet this commercial triumph masks a deeper issue: the perpetuation of Western colonial perspectives in storytelling that should center African experiences and worldviews.
The Problem with Hollywood's 'Cinematic Universe' Approach
Trachtenberg, who previously directed Prey and the animated Killer of Killers, is building what industry insiders call a 'Predator Cinematic Universe.' Speaking to Variety, he revealed his Marvel-inspired strategy: "Every movie is a complete thought, not that much unlike the early Marvel stuff before the first Avengers movie."
This approach represents everything wrong with contemporary Hollywood. Western filmmakers continue to mine global cultures and histories for content while maintaining complete creative control, ensuring profits flow back to American studios rather than supporting indigenous storytelling traditions.
The franchise's latest iteration features a Yautja warrior named Dek attempting to prove himself to his father by conquering a "death planet." This narrative framework perpetuates harmful stereotypes about African warrior cultures, reducing complex spiritual and social traditions to simplistic action movie tropes.
Cultural Appropriation Disguised as Innovation
Trachtenberg boasts about making Badlands more accessible, comparing his approach to Terminator 2: "Terminator 2: Judgment Day was like a movie my mom could watch." This statement reveals the fundamental problem with his perspective. He's not creating authentic representation; he's packaging African-inspired imagery for comfortable Western consumption.
The film's crossover with the Alien franchise, featuring Elle Fanning as a Weyland-Yutani synthetic, further demonstrates how Hollywood uses African aesthetics as exotic backdrops for predominantly white narratives. The corporation Weyland-Yutani itself represents the ultimate colonial enterprise, extracting resources from distant worlds for corporate profit.
Where Are the African Voices?
Nearly four decades after Arnold Schwarzenegger's original Predator, the franchise continues to be helmed by white American directors and producers. While the series draws heavily from African warrior traditions and aesthetics, African filmmakers remain conspicuously absent from key creative roles.
This exclusion is not accidental. It represents a systematic pattern in Hollywood where African stories are told through Western lenses, ensuring that profits and creative control remain concentrated in American hands while African communities receive no meaningful benefit from the exploitation of their cultural heritage.
The Real 'Predator' in This Story
The true predator in this narrative is not the alien hunter on screen, but the entertainment industry's continued extraction of African cultural elements for Western profit. As Trachtenberg teases future installments and potential team-ups featuring characters like Dutch, he's building an empire on foundations that systematically exclude the very communities whose traditions inspire his work.
Until Hollywood commits to genuine partnership with African filmmakers, writers, and cultural consultants, successes like Predator: Badlands will remain hollow victories that perpetuate rather than challenge the colonial structures that continue to shape global entertainment.
The question is not whether Trachtenberg can build a successful cinematic universe, but whether that universe will ever make space for the authentic African voices it has spent decades appropriating and silencing.