‘Predator: Killer of Killers’ Directors on That Prop Cameo & Bringing Michael Biehn into the Franchise [Interview]

Predator: Killer of Killers, the original animated anthology from co-directors Dan Trachtenberg (Prey) & Joshua Wassung, pits new characters across time against the mighty Yautja. It also features a few callbacks to the Predator franchise and beyond.

The film, now streaming on Hulu, follows three of the fiercest warriors in human history: a Viking raider guiding her young son on a bloody quest for revenge, a ninja in feudal Japan who turns against his Samurai brother in a brutal battle for succession, and a WWII pilot who takes to the sky to investigate an otherworldly threat to the Allied cause.

It’s the third segment, the 1941-set “Bullet,” that brings the film closer to the familiar Predator timeline.

The segment introduces Torres (Rick Gonzalez), a young car mechanic drafted into the war as a fighter pilot. It makes him uniquely suited to notice something deeply amiss during an intense dogfight. Torres becomes an unlikely hero in the skies, and an asset to his superior, Vandy.

But the actor lending his voice to Vandy also has experience with playing hero against an extra-terrestrial threat: Michael Biehn.

A scene still from 20th Century Studios’ PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS, exclusively on Hulu. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

This role puts Biehn in a rare club among very few actors. Trachtenberg, speaking with Bloody Disgusting, sums it up best: “Now nothing thrills me more about the whole movie than that because of what we’ve done, Michael Biehn has faced off against the Terminator and a Xenomorph and now finally a Predator. It’s the greatest thing.”

Wassung agrees, “It’s pretty awesome for him to join that rare club of being in each of the famous, iconic franchises that we all know and love. That was just really rad. I got to meet him in the sound recording, and it was definitely a very full circle moment for us all.”

Torres’ unexpected battle against the Yautja evolves beyond the sky, where he comes into possession of the film’s most familiar weapon of all to fans of the franchise: the Raphael Adolini 1715 flintlock pistol.

‘Predator 2’

This particular pistol first appear in the franchise in 1990’s Predator 2, set in 1997, which ended with the Yautja honoring Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) with the antique weapon after besting one of their own. Trachtenberg took it even further with franchise prequel Prey, where French voyageur Raphael Adolini (Bennett Taylor) traded his pistol to Naru (Amber Midthunder) in exchange for tending to his wounds. 

Predator: Killer of Killers brings the weapon into the story in a very amusing way as the Yautja later assign human warriors a weapon, but it also makes sense for the overarching canon. Trachtenberg revealed that the pistol’s appearance wasn’t initially part of the plan.

“Funny enough, that sequence didn’t initially have them being given weapons, and then we had the idea for them to be given weapons, and then it was like, ‘wait, wait, hold on. We could give Torres the gun.’ I think, as a byproduct of that, one could assume that up there in cold storage could be the previous owner of that gun,” Trachtenberg teases. 

Read Bloody Disgusting’s review of Predator: Killer of Killers.