Part of the interesting story behind Predators is that Fox is reportedly letting Nimrod Antal, Robert Rodriguez and Troublemaker Studios have their way with the project. At Comic Con, Rodriguez said they were just going to hole up in Austin and make the movie their way. But we knew the film wouldn’t entirely be shot there, and one report suggests the film won’t be based entirely in the Texas Hill Country, as the production has been scouting jungles in Hawaii. That sounds more like a Predator movie, at least.
Here’s the salient bit from the site Reel Hawaii:

Scouts for 20th Century Fox’s $40-million creature feature are back on the Big Island for their third week of scouting Hawaii most of it where a lot of jungles have been looked at. The production would film for 18 days with an October start if the Hawaii portion is a go.

The key data there isn’t the location, but the duration. Eighteen days is not a lot. I don’t know if Rodriguez can push Antal to shoot as fast as Rodriguez does on his own pictures, but by normal standards, eighteen days is barely enough to shoot a couple of big jungle sequences. I like the idea of genre pictures being shot down and dirty, but there’s a line between fast and shoddy, and Rodriguez productions don’t always fall on the preferred side.

(Edited to add: Eighteen days is *just* for Hawaii. The entire production schedule is a lot longer than that. I’m primarily wondering how much jungle action we’re likely to see, if that’s the time allotment.)

The Predators shoot reportedly starts later this month in Austin; Nimrod Antal is deep in pre-production right now while Rodriquez and crew are finishing up the Machete shoot. We still don’t know much about the picture at all. None of the locked cast has been revealed, assuming that any key members are actually locked. (Not a point to worry; casting can go right to the wire.) We’ve been told that the film has a group of soldiers landing on the Predator planet, where they have to face the horrors and danger one expects in that sort of situation.