Predator: Badlands

Predator: Badlands – Backpacks, PG-13 Backlash & Secret Stranger Things Cameos: All the Real-World Tea

Brace your mandibles, Badlands fans. The movie may be about an outcast Yautja in a far‑flung future, but the juiciest drama was happening right here on planet Earth. From wild stunt rigs to fandom meltdowns, here’s the real-world gossip trail this movie left behind.

On-Set Drama: “Nice to Meet You, Now Wear Her Like a Backpack”

• According to The Hollywood Reporter, Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster‑Koloamatangi weren’t even given chemistry reads or proper screen tests together. They met briefly at a stunt rehearsal and were then shipped off to a remote New Zealand set and literally strapped to each other for huge chunks of the shoot .
• Director Dan Trachtenberg’s team devised custom wire rigs that had never been used before, with cables anchored to real trees in the New Zealand landscape so Dek could haul Thia around like a Predator-pack ^[1].
• One especially unglamorous contraption? A “wheelbarrow-like” rig hooked around Dimitrius’s waist so he could drag Elle up hills while she sat balanced on two wheels ^[1]. Eat your heart out, green screens.
• To sell Thia’s legless synth body, Elle’s legs were painted blue and slung into a harness setup; sometimes they’d even adjust the height of stools and furniture so her body looked correctly truncated on camera ^[1]. Spine of steel, butt of iron.

Cast Feuds & Weird Vibes: When Your Co‑Star Freaks You Out

• No screaming matches, but there was one very low-key psychological mind game: Elle’s double-jointed party trick. Entertainment Weekly reports that she freaked out her Predator: Badlands co‑star by bending her elbows in such a way that he thought she’d snapped her arms in front of him . No need for CGI horror when your lead can do body horror on command.
• Dimitrius also admitted that Elle’s dual roles as synth sisters Thia and Tessa genuinely messed with his head. In a deleted-scene feature highlighted by People, he says there was “quite a noticeable difference” between her as Thia vs. Tessa—so much so that when she walked around set in Tessa’s pristine white suit, he became “a little bit standoffish” and felt like, “I don’t know this lady… She’s a bit different from my other friend.”
• Translation: no feud, but definite “who are you right now?” energy between takes.

Romance Rumors: Are Elle & Dimitrius More Than Just Space Buddies?

• Here’s what we actually know: Elle and Dimitrius have been all over press tours together—special screenings in London, red carpets in Hollywood, and cheerful joint interviews where they rave about how much they trusted each other on set ^[1].
• Photos from London screenings show the pair laughing, posing side-by-side and looking extremely comfortable together, which naturally sent parts of the fandom into ship-mode ^[9].
• But: there are no credible reports from major outlets explicitly linking them romantically; the “Dek x Thia but make it real” narrative is very much in the fans-speculate category at this point. So for now, it’s canon that they’re just brutally committed stunt partners… with suspiciously good chemistry.

Scandals & Controversies: The PG‑13 Rating That Broke the Internet

• The real Badlands scandal wasn’t a leaked script or a secret affair—it was the PG‑13 rating. When it was confirmed the film wouldn’t be R‑rated, fan communities on Reddit and elsewhere went into meltdown, accusing Disney/20th Century of declawing the franchise .
• The set reports and interviews tried to calm everyone down: producer Ben Rosenblatt explained that the PG‑13 was purely because there are no humans in the movie—no human red blood for the ratings board to freak out over ^[4].
• In other words, they didn’t pull punches on violence; they just swapped arterial spray for android fluid and alien ichor. Still, the “PG‑13 Predator” headline was enough to keep the discourse raging right up to release ^[4].

Leaks, Cameos & Industry Power Plays: Stranger Things in Yautja Space

• Variety dropped one of the coolest behind-the-scenes bombs: Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer secretly cameo as the voice of Dek’s ship computer .
• The Duffers were mixing Stranger Things on the same stages while Trachtenberg was mixing Badlands, so he grabbed them to record lines. They had to learn bits of the Yautja language on the fly, including turning a nonsense string of letters—“N, G, I, L, A”—into something that sounded like actual alien dialogue ^[3].
• And in the “legends texting legends” department, James Cameron himself watched Badlands early and emailed Trachtenberg saying that when he first heard the concept he didn’t think it would work… but after seeing the cut, “holy crap, you really pulled it off.” ^[3]
• Cameron is thanked in the end credits, a quiet nod to the fact that the godfather of sci‑fi was basically an unofficial hype man for the movie behind the scenes ^[3].

Wild Trivia: Ninja Courses, Deleted Scenes & Monster Linguistics

• Dimitrius didn’t just bulk up a bit and call it a day—he trained on an American Ninja Warrior–style obstacle course for his audition and then had to learn an entire constructed alien language, Yautja, with help from a professional linguist ^[1].
• He’s now described as fluent in Predator, which is probably the single coolest line anyone has ever been able to put on a résumé ^[1].
• A now widely shared deleted scene, spotlighted by sites like AVP Galaxy and People, shows a longer version of Dek and Thia traversing the watery “Squirt Canyon” trench—cut for pacing but infamous among fans both for the name and the extra character beats that didn’t make the theatrical version ^[4][2].
• Director interviews and featurettes reveal that creature sidekick Bud the Kalisk was designed as a mash‑up of cute and terrifying, inspired by characters like Rocket Raccoon, Groot, and even World of Warcraft’s Murlocs, to give the film its own oddball mascot energy ^[3].