The Real Reason The Predator Killed Shane Black's Hawkins First

Almost 40 years later, "Predator" remains the gold standard for subversive genre switcheroos. At first, director John McTiernan's 1987 classic plays like your typical '80s testosterone fest, with Arnold Schwarzenegger posturing alongside other muscleheads and cheerily killing nameless baddies (but not without chucking out a winking one-liner). It's only then that the Sword of Damocles that is the film's opening, in which something from outer space is shown entering Earth's atmosphere, comes crashing down. With that, the movie seamlessly transforms into a sci-fi slasher in the jungles of Central America, with Arnold's Dutch and his fellow paramilitaries becoming more or less the equivalent of Laurie Strode and the other teen girls in John Carpenter's "Halloween." (Though I'm pretty sure Jamie Lee Curtis didn't poop her pants while preparing for that film, unlike a certain "Predator" star.)

Just like Dutch evolves into the movie's Final Girl, Shane Black's wiseacre Rick Hawkins is quick to become the titular extra-terrestrial hunter's first victim. And seeing as Black was fresh off selling the script to "Lethal Weapon" — another convention-bucking '80s project full of sharp writing and action — shortly before working on "Predator," you'd be forgiven for assuming he must've had a hand in scripting his character's shocking demise. Except, that apparently wasn't the case. Rather, when interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter for its 2017 oral history of the film, producer John Davis indicated that Black had mainly been recruited to do revisions on the script credited to Jim and John Thomas. Black, however, insisted he was just there to act.

So, how did the other "Predator" creatives take that? By having Black make history as the first person to die at the mandibles of a Predator (aka a Yautja) on-screen.

In his defense, Black was already juggling several projects when he agreed to work on "Predator," including doing rewrites on "Lethal Weapon," itself his first produced script. Thus, you can see why he would've preferred for "Predator" to remain an acting gig only, especially when he had no idea whether his writing career was about to take to the skies or blow up during liftoff. Nevertheless, it appears the movie's producers were primarily interested in his off-screen talents. As Davis recalled:

"[...] I met Shane on [1987's 'Predator']. Shane was a really great writer who had just written this great script called 'Lethal Weapon.' We wanted him to do a rewrite on the ['Predator'] script. So, we put him in the movie, because he's an actor. And we got him down there, and we asked him to do a rewrite, and he said he was an actor in the movie and not a writer. So, he was the first person we killed. He got killed seven minutes into the movie."

To be fair, being the first Yautja victim in a "Predator" film is no small honor, so the movie's producers really did Black a favor (even if that wasn't their intention). Black himself didn't seem to have too many hard feelings either, given that he returned to the franchise three decades later to co-write and direct the 2018 sequel "The Predator." Unfortunately, much of Black's good will for the property was likely extinguished by his experience making that film, which didn't fare well after being heavily retooled during post-production (as he and "The Predator" co-writer Fred Dekker have since discussed in greater depth). But hey, he's still Predator fatality number uno. Nobody can take that away from him.