15 Movies You Need To Watch If You Like The Predator Franchise

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If there's one thing the "Predator" franchise has going for it, through good and bad, it's that it always manages to defy expectations. Since the first film features Arnold Schwarzenegger using his wits to defeat a vicious Yautja, one might have assumed the series would become a starring vehicle for him. But nope! Each installment brings something new to the table, whether it's a crossover with the "Alien" franchise or making a Yautja the protagonist in "Predator: Badlands." Each movie is basically a self-contained adventure where someone has to fight aliens, and I wouldn't have it any other way. 

Assuming you've already watched all of the "Predator" movies, including the "Alien vs. Predator" crossovers, you might be wondering what else is out there. There are bound to be more "Predator" films in the future that will continue to explore how Yautja are the greatest warriors in the universe, but this franchise isn't the only place you'll find amazing action and awesome creature designs. These other movies like "Predator" are bound to satiate whatever appetite you have for intergalactic mayhem. 

"Alien" and "Predator" could be considered something like sister franchises. They've always been inextricably linked, probably because it's easy enough to have multiple alien species occupy the same cinematic universe. And like "Predator," you don't need to feel confined to only watching one movie, as "Alien" has spawned a series all its own. Unlike "Predator," though, "Alien" does have something of a continuing storyline for Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) over the first few movies, before the franchise turns its attention elsewhere. That means there is a correct order in which to watch the "Alien" movies, rather than merely bouncing around at your leisure like you can do with "Predator." 

"Alien" is centered around the Xenomorph, a lethal alien hunter that can give the Yautja a run for its money (as demonstrated in the "Alien vs. Predator" movies). With dual mouths, acid blood, and a desire to kill all in its path, Xenomorphs have wreaked havoc since the original movie came out in 1979. Not every entry matches up in quality to "Predator," but it's safe to say "Alien" and "Aliens" are the peak of horror's "alien terror" subgenre.

The 1980s were a golden era of movie monsters; in addition to the Yautja, the world also got the Terminator. Obviously, the biggest similarity between "Predator" and 1984's "The Terminator" is that they both star Arnold Schwarzenegger, only he's the hero in the former and villain in the latter. In "The Terminator," Schwarzenegger portrays the eponymous cybernetic assassin who's sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton).

Whereas Yautja hunt for sport, the Terminator has a singular purpose. It's designed to protect the artificial intelligence of Skynet, but by the second movie its loyalties had been flipped. If you like "The Terminator," you absolutely owe it to yourself to check out "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," which allows Schwarzenegger's T-800 to become the good guy and protect Sarah and her son, John (Edward Furlong). We'll be honest: the "Terminator" timeline gets a little wonky from there, with subsequent sequels seeing diminishing returns. But if nothing else, the first two are sci-fi classics. 

"RoboCop" sounds like the kind of B-movie a total of 12 people would see in various rental stores throughout the '80s. However, it turned into one of the most influential and important science-fiction movies of its era, sharply eviscerating Ronald Reagan-era consumerism. The 1987 movie sees cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) get murdered in the line of duty and brought back to life as the emotionless RoboCop, who is tasked with cleaning up the streets while struggling to remember his humanity. 

Like "Predator," "RoboCop" skewered existing action norms at the time. The violence in "RoboCop" is so over-the-top that it forces the audience to question whether movies like this are just harmless entertainment or are desensitizing all of us to real-world brutality. Similarly, the cast of "Predator" is filled with macho action stars packing big muscles and even bigger guns, but they all get picked off one by one, effectively turning it into a slasher flick where machismo gets you nowhere. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch only wins in the end thanks to his wits, not his brawn. "RoboCop" and "Predator" may seem like there's not much going on beneath the surface, but there's more to them than meets the eye. 

The '80s may have been a glorious time for extraterrestrial action flicks, but don't ignore 21st century offerings like "Attack the Block." A collection of malevolent aliens have arrived on a London council estate, and it's up to a bunch of streetwise kids to get rid of them. At first glance, the story borrows heavily from "Predator 2," where the aliens are taken out of a jungle and into an urban environment. But these kids aren't commandos or cops; they're just disenfranchised youth trying to protect what's theirs, something they've had to do their entire lives. 

"Attack the Block" is a stylish good time with one particularly memorable sequence in the form of the hallway fight scene you need to witness to believe. Much like "Predator," the way to defeat the "Attack the Block" aliens isn't necessarily with brute force. The kids, led by Moses (John Boyega), need to learn their enemies' weaknesses to emerge victorious. And like all the best action movies, there's ample social commentary in how the kids have been failed by the social institutions meant to protect them.

If you've ever wanted to see "Predator" but with werewolves, "Dog Soldiers" is the movie for you. A group of British soldiers are dropped off in the remote Scottish highlands for training exercises, only to realize they aren't alone. Werewolves have made the area their home — and there's also a little bit of "Alien" in the proceedings. The soldiers realize they were merely bait to lure and capture a werewolf for study, much like the Nostromo crew were seen as expendable by their superiors in the pursuit of capturing a Xenomorph. 

"Dog Soldiers" wears its influences on its sleeve, but it's honestly astonishing how good it is. The characters are fully fleshed out and have some great camaraderie so that you actually care about them once the monsters show up, and the creature designs are fantastic. Remakes are a dime a dozen these days, but this is one low-budget horror flick I actually wouldn't mind seeing get remade with a bit more money put into it. 

With so many great monster/alien movies released throughout the 1980s, it's only natural that a few fell to the wayside in the greater public consciousness. That appears to be the case for 1989's "Leviathan," but don't overlook this fun gem. Instead of looking toward the stars for inspiration to greater threats, this film turns its attention to the horrors of the ocean, as a deep-sea crew encounters a horrific mutant. Just as there's no escape from monsters in the jungle or the depths of space, there's nowhere to go in the ocean. 

While the premise of "Leviathan" sounds familiar, there's plenty to enjoy when it comes to the underwater monster. That's due to Stan Winston being onboard as a special effects artist who also happened to come up with the Yautja design in the original "Predator." Even with a familiar set-up, the memorable monster helps elevate "Leviathan" above similar oceanic horror films.

Movies like "Predator" typically involve a protagonist trying to kill whatever monster is around, but "A Quiet Place" is purely about survival. The characters are more than willing to go toe-to-toe with a creature if circumstances call for it, but the world has been fully taken over. They're just trying to live in this new reality: one in which aliens hunt their prey via sound, so all remaining humans have to be as quiet as possible in order to live. 

"A Quiet Place" is a great horror movie for non-horror fans. The film is more interested in building tension than having outright gore or violence. Given the soundscape where everything's mostly silent, anytime you hear something louder than the wind blowing, you instantly tense up. Yes, characters die, but it's done in a way where an alien snatches someone up and audiences don't need to dwell on the bloody aftermath. Instead, the focus is on family and how parents sometimes have to make great sacrifices to give their children the best shot possible at life. 

Despite being critical to the horror canon these days, 1982's "The Thing" almost killed director John Carpenter's career upon release due to negative reviews and a poor box office showing. It was simply ahead of its time, and pretty much everyone today recognizes the film's genius. The story is centered around a shape-shifting extraterrestrial infiltrating a science station in the Arctic, causing its inhabitants to turn on one another once they realize they can't trust that people are who they say they are. 

It's a perfect encapsulation of Cold War-era paranoia, but not being able to trust your closest friends and coworkers is something that resonates no matter what the time period is. "The Thing" represents a more intimate, psychological horror compared to something like "Predator," which is scary basically because an alien's shooting at you. The creature in "The Thing" won't just kill you; it'll assume your form and turn your body into something unrecognizable until you wish for death. It's the zenith of the body horror subgenre, and if you're looking for an alien movie that truly crawls under your skin, this one'll do it. 

After directing the aforementioned superb "Dog Soldiers," Neil Marshall delivered one of the scariest movies ever about grief with "The Descent." Reeling from the death of husband and daughter, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) embarks on a spelunking expedition a year later with her friends to get her mind off it. (Editorial note: Spelunking seems like an awful hobby even without cannibalistic cave monsters in the mix, and I don't understand why anyone would ever do it.) 

"The Descent" effectively utilizes base fears everyone pretty much has of tight spaces and darkness. Once the monsters (known as crawlers) reveal themselves, you'll find yourself trying to pick them out when a frame is just a little too dark for your liking. The crawlers are absolutely terrifying, but even if the movie didn't have them, you'd still have a group of people stuck in an unexplored cave system and a woman needing to break free of her grief and find the inner strength to live once more.

Us humans like to consider ourselves at the top of the food chain. It makes any movie where people are picked off like target practice existentially terrifying, but "Pitch Black" makes that terrifying ordeal pretty entertaining. The sci-fi film introduces Riddick (Vin Diesel), a criminal with surgically enhanced eyes that allow him to see in the dark. Riddick is being transported as a prisoner onboard a spaceship that crash-lands on an alien world, which happens to be filled with creatures that only come out at night. Many of his fellow passengers meet untimely demises, but Riddick is the perfect man for surviving this type of situation. 

"Pitch Black" helped put Diesel on the map, as Riddick is a compelling protagonist. He has a seedy past but works toward redemption, attempting to save others from the alien threats. The other characters get fleshed out, too, forcing everyone into morally gray territory where viewers feel somewhat conflicted about all of them. Suffice it to say, "Pitch Black" offered plenty of room for expansion, which is why it got turned into a full trilogy that's worth exploring.

A new "Blade" movie starring Mahershala Ali seems forever cursed to never quite make it into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Fortunately, the world doesn't necessarily need more "Blade" movies when we already had the perfect one come out in 1998, starring Wesley Snipes as the eponymous daywalker. Blade has all the powers of a vampire with none of the weaknesses, and he's taken it upon himself to track down and kill as many bloodsuckers as he can. 

"Blade" is one of the most "Hell yeah"-type action movies of its time, and it's a total credit to the production design and fight choreography that it doesn't feel like any other comic book movie. It has darker themes and grittier, horror-based influences that elevate it beyond a simple superhero in a spandex suit punching bad guys. It's not a surprise that Spider-Man and the X-Men became box office hits throughout the 2000s, but "Blade" showed how more offbeat comic book characters could work well within this medium. 

Before John McTiernan directed "Predator," he made a little film called "Nomads." The film follows anthropologist Jean-Charles Pommier (Pierce Brosnan) who becomes haunted by malevolent spirits upon moving to Los Angeles. It's a creepy film, but wasn't exactly a hit with critics or at the box office. However, it did catch the attention of one Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the actor's memoir, "Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story," Schwarzenegger discusses how he wanted to work with McTiernan after seeing "Nomads":

"What set it apart was the tension McTiernan maintained in a film that cost less than $1 million to make. We felt that if he could create that kind of atmosphere with so little money, he must be very talented." 

Indeed, McTiernan would go on to make some truly epic action movies. In addition to "Predator," he helmed "Die Hard" and "The Hunt for Red October." "Nomads" often gets lost in the mix when discussing his greater filmography, but if you want to see that tension he was able to transfer over to "Predator," it's cool to see where it all began for McTiernan.

Before filmmaker Bong Joon-ho won several Oscars for "Parasite," he took a stab at making a monster movie in the vein of "Godzilla" with 2006's "The Host." A monster has formed in a South Korean river due to chemical dumping from American entities, and this monster kidnaps the daughter, Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung), of food vendor Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho). Despite a quarantine order in place, Gang-du and his family will set out to rescue her. 

It's fascinating to view "The Host" in relation to "Parasite." If nothing else, the two film titles co-exist in one another, seeing how any parasite needs a host in order to survive. And "The Host" still dabbles with themes of social inequality as the Park family are impoverished, meaning they're the only ones who would care enough about a poor little girl going missing. A monster movie with a healthy dose of social commentary makes it a great companion piece to "Predator."

2017's "Life" is a decent update to the "Alien" formula. A crew aboard the International Space Station have discovered intelligent life from Mars, but the science experiments soon turn deadly. The organism starts off small enough, but it quickly evolves and begins killing astronauts. It's a classic claustrophobic monster movie in space that'll probably feel familiar even if you've never seen it before, but it has some better-than-expected performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson. 

Even if you can likely guess many of the film's plot beats, the ending of "Life" will undoubtedly knock the wind out of you. It's worth watching for that reason along that we're not going to spoil here, but is worth the wait. Moviegoers have seen plenty of great alien movies over the years. "Life" proves that a new one doesn't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel. It just needs to offer up some good scares, with a fun twist thrown in to make it worth the price of admission. 

It's one thing to deal with a Yautja. Yes, it's a fierce warrior alien, but at least it's roughly the size of a human and you can do some damage to it. The same can't be said when a kaiju rampages through a major metropolitan area, which is what makes "Cloverfield" terrifying. The 2008 film utilizes a found footage perspective to show what it would be like to be an average person running through a city while a monster tears apart buildings. It may give you a headache, but it also provides a visceral thrill of what the chaos on the ground would look like if a Godzilla-sized threat emerged. 

And if you like the first "Cloverfield" movie, don't overlook "10 Cloverfield Lane." It's a very different kind of film, but arguably even more fascinating, as it focuses on a woman being held against her will by a man who claims the world has ended outside. It was also directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who revitalized the "Predator" series with "Prey," "Predator: Killer of Killers," and "Predator: Badlands." Trachtenberg has mastered the monster movie, whether it's actual aliens or simply a man off his rocker. Now if only someone could come along to revive the "Cloverfield" franchise...