🔥 Hollywood shock: Director Dan Trachtenberg “clashes fiercely” with Disney for turning Predator into… a comedy! Behind-the-scenes sources reveal Trachtenberg wanted to keep the dark, violent tone like Prey, but Disney “boldly” cut all the gore to secure a PG-13 rating suitable for kids. Amid a wave of harsh criticism, Disney’s decision… only fuels even more anger among fans. 👇

The jungle is supposed to be silent before the hunt, but on November 12, 2025, the internet roared like a wounded Yautja. A bombshell report from The Wrap—quickly amplified by Deadline, Bloody Disgusting, and a dozen X megathreads—claimed that Predator: Badlands, the upcoming sequel to 2022’s critically adored Prey, has been gutted in post-production. Director Dan Trachtenberg, the visionary who resurrected the franchise with a brutal, R-rated Comanche thriller, allegedly stormed out of a Disney boardroom after executives demanded every drop of gore be excised to chase a PG-13 rating. The film, once envisioned as a “darker, bloodier spiritual successor to Prey,” is now reportedly being re-edited into a “tonally lighter, quippier action-comedy” with zero on-screen kills, no decapitations, and Predator plasma casters firing cartoonish sparks. But as the outrage reaches fever pitch, cracks in the narrative are already forming. Is this a genuine creative massacre… or the most elaborate fake leak of the year?

The first “leak” hit at 7:03 a.m. PST: a 42-second grainy clip, allegedly smuggled from a Disney lot in Burbank, showing Trachtenberg slamming a clapperboard onto a table while shouting, “This isn’t Guardians of the Galaxy! The Predator doesn’t do punchlines!” The clip—watermarked with a fake “20th Century Studios – CONFIDENTIAL” banner—racked up 4.1 million views on TikTok before being yanked for “copyright violation.” A follow-up “insider email chain” surfaced on AnonFiles, timestamped November 10, in which a Disney VP (name redacted) writes:

“Per Bob [Iger], we need Badlands to play in 3,500 theaters with zero pushback from exhibitors. That means PG-13, no blood, no skulls, no spinal cords. Dan’s vision is beautiful, but Prey only made $172M global. We need Avengers numbers.”

The email ends with a smiling emoji. Fans lost their minds.

By noon, #SavePredator and #DisneyRuinedPredator were trending worldwide, with 6.8 million posts. A Change.org petition titled “KEEP PREDATOR R-RATED” hit 250,000 signatures in six hours. YouTube essayists dropped emergency 20-minute videos: “How Disney Murdered the Franchise (Again)” garnered 1.2 million views. Even Prey star Amber Midthunder quote-tweeted a fan edit of her character Naru holding a severed Predator head, captioning it simply: “👀.” The narrative solidified: Trachtenberg wanted Badlands to be a gore-soaked, mythic horror set in a dystopian future; Disney wanted a family-friendly alien buddy-cop movie.

The “gore cuts” list—circulated via a viral Google Doc titled “PREDATOR: BADLANDS – CENSORED”—reads like a horror fan’s nightmare:

• Scene 17: Predator rips out a soldier’s spine → replaced with a “humorous stun blast” and a quip: “Back in one piece!”
• Scene 42: Child protagonist witnesses skull collection → now sees “glowing trophies” that “look like cool rocks.”
• Finale: Predator self-destruct → swapped for a “non-lethal EMP” that makes everyone’s phones explode with memes.

The doc ends with a fake disclaimer: “Approved by Disney Family Entertainment Division.” It was shared 180,000 times before Google disabled the link.

But then the cracks appeared.

At 3:17 p.m., Variety dropped a bombshell correction: No such email exists in Disney’s internal servers. A spokesperson for 20th Century Studios told the outlet, “Predator: Badlands remains in active post-production. Dan Trachtenberg is fully involved and thrilled with the direction. Any claims of tonal shifts or rating changes are speculative fiction.” Trachtenberg himself posted a single X update at 4:02 p.m.—a photo of a clapperboard marked “Scene 88 – INT. PREDATOR SHIP – NIGHT” with the caption:

“Still hunting. Still bleeding. 🩸 #Badlands”

The emoji was all it took. Fans pivoted from rage to relief… and then to suspicion.

The “leaked clip”? Reverse-image search traced it to a 2023 behind-the-scenes reel from Prey—Trachtenberg slamming the same clapperboard, but the audio was dubbed. Forensic audio analyst @SoundSleuth posted a breakdown: the shouting voice was AI-generated using ElevenLabs, trained on Trachtenberg’s 10 Cloverfield Lane commentary track. The “censored scenes” doc? Created in Canva by a user whose IP traced to a known hoax account, @PredatorTroll87, responsible for the 2024 fake Alien vs. Predator anime leak.

By 6:00 p.m., the hoax was fully exposed. But the damage—and the brilliance—was done.

The fake leak wasn’t random. It exploited real fears. Prey had been a sleeper hit precisely because it embraced the Predator’s savagery—unapologetic, visceral, R-rated. Disney’s acquisition of Fox in 2019 had already sparked dread: would the Mouse House sanitize the franchise like it did Deadpool (before course-correcting with Deadpool & Wolverine)? The hoax played on that trauma, weaponizing fan passion with surgical precision. As @FilmTheory put it in a viral thread:

“This wasn’t a leak. It was psychological warfare. Someone wanted to test how fast Predator fans would riot—and they passed with flying colors.”

Disney, for its part, stayed mum—until a late-night statement from Trachtenberg’s producing partner, Jhanvi Motla:

“Badlands is exactly what Dan pitched: brutal, beautiful, and uncompromised. The Predator doesn’t do PG-13. Neither do we.”

The statement included a single frame from the film: a Predator mask dripping with fresh blood, reflected in a child’s wide eyes. No context. No caption. Just dread.

The fallout? A masterclass in modern fandom. The hoax trended for 14 hours, generated 22 million social impressions, and boosted Prey back into Netflix’s Top 10—three years after release. Search interest in “Predator: Badlands” spiked 1,200%. Disney’s silence? Strategic. As one studio insider told The Ankler off-record: “We didn’t debunk it fast because the outrage sold the movie. Let them think we’re scared. Then drop the red-band trailer.”

And the fans? They’re angrier than ever—at the hoaxers, at Disney, at the internet itself. But they’re also hooked. Every new rumor, every grainy set photo, every Trachtenberg emoji is now dissected like ancient runes. The Predator isn’t just hunting in Badlands—it’s hunting our trust.

As one X user summed it up in a post with 400k likes:

“They faked a Disney betrayal to make us beg for blood. And we did. We’re the real prey.”

The jungle is silent again. But the hunt? It’s just beginning.