‘Predator’ Officially Shares Its Universe With ‘Alien’, Marvel, and ‘Independence Day’ — ‘Star Wars’ Could Be Next
If you’d told fans in the ’80s that Predator might one day share shelf space with Star Wars, they’d have laughed you out of the theater. But here we are in 2025, with Disney owning both franchises — and a growing sense that the walls between them are starting to crack.
Predator: Badlands, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, is the latest film in the long-running series, and it quietly pulls together pieces from across Disney’s expanding sci-fi empire. The movie features the Weyland-Yutani corporation from the Alien franchise (although hardly surprising considering both franchises’ long history of crossovers) and even hides an Independence Day alien skull among its background trophies (which is surprising).
The Yautja’s universe is seemingly no longer isolated — it’s part of something bigger.
And the connections aren’t confined to film, either. In recent years, Predator has even crossed over with Marvel Comics.
The fact that Marvel now publishes official Predator stories under the same corporate roof as Star Wars makes a future crossover, at least on the comic page, entirely possible.
It helps that Badlands itself carries the faint echo of a galaxy far, far away. Its desert landscapes, duels with glowing blades, and a heroic alien lead all feel like deliberate nods to Star Wars’ tone and texture. And then, of course, there’s the most obvious nod: the lead Dek — the young Yautja protagonist played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi — carrying the damaged android Thia (Elle Fanning) is a deliberate reference to The Empire Strikes Back‘s Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) and C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) brief team-up.
No one’s saying the Yautja will be hunting Jedi anytime soon (although that pitch alone sounds like more than enough to guarantee a ton of ticket sales), but under Disney, the lines between these two faraway galaxies is suddenly blurry. With Marvel, Alien, Predator, and Star Wars all under the one banner, it seems less a question of if and more of when.
Would you like to see Predator cross over with Star Wars? Share your thoughts with us in the comments down below!
