Despite Abrams and his team’s Herculean efforts to deliver a massive blockbuster spectacle that could also neatly tie together three trilogies' worth of story and character, The Rise of Skywalker was an abject failure. The movie was panned by fans and critics alike, and performed worse at the box office than Episodes VII or VIII. To quote the director’s prophetic interview again: “Sticking this landing is one of the harder jobs that I could have taken.”

We always knew Predator: Badlands was going to be a crossover movie. The first trailer confirmed that Elle Fanning was playing a Synthetic, a robot manufactured by the evil Weyland-Yutani corporation from the Alien franchise. This makes Dan Trachtenberg’s new science-fiction epic a spiritual sequel of sorts to the Alien vs. Predator series. But what the trailers didn’t reveal was just how heavily Badlands would lean into Alien territory — albeit without actually featuring any Xenomorphs.