Ain’t It Cool News spoke with Robert Rodriguez who is producing Predators and Rodriguez confirmed LatinoReview.com‘s earlier story announcing Nimrod Antal (Vacancy) will be sitting in the director’s chair for the proposed “re-inventing [of] the franchise,” which started with the Arnold Schwarzenegger action classic in 1987. The film is already set for a July 7, 2010 release, but apparently the script is still being finished, a scenario that seems a bit odd, but the ball seems to be rolling strong.
Story details have been kept mum but Rodriguez did tell AICN the film will be a “character driven action movie” and will involve “a very intense group of people stranded on a Predator planet discovering unspeakable horrors (that are not always from outside their group). So like the original movie, the title does have a double meaning. Aliens was a different take on the Alien idea, and an original movie in it’s own right, and that’s what we want to do with this.”
So it sounds like this may be a way of looking at Predators as a sequel to the first film and Rodriguez takes it a step further saying this is an attempt to get “as far away as possible from the AVP movies.” He followed that up saying, “As to how this movie will be viewed, one of the guys at Fox told me ‘No one is ever going to talk about AVP again after this film, I will stake my life on it.'”
So we are now left with casting and just over a year until the film is slated to be in theaters. With that kind of a timeline things should heat up relatively quick.
As for Antal, he has Armored set to hit theaters on September 18 starring Matt Dillon, Skeet Ulrich, Columbus Short, Laurence Fishburne, Jean Reno and Milo Ventimiglia. I added the trailer for that one directly below. I enjoyed Antal’s Vacancy as a legit thriller back in 2007, but Armored, which is apparently the film that caught Rodriguez’s attention and got Antal the job, looks rather routine to me, but we’ll have to wait and see.
