In my Predator 2 review I observed that the merger of Alien and Predator franchises was not a Paul W. S. Anderson's ( the director of AVP ) fault, since even that movie already had a lot of Alien references in it, including a Xenomorph scull. So it was almost expected by this point that the next movie in the franchise would feature Xenomorphs.
Predator: Badlands is Dan Trachtenberg's third Predator movie after Prey 2022 and Killer of the Killers 2025. And strangely enough non of these movies have any kind of connection to one other. They are not sequels. They are stand alone films, different in style and tone. Telling different stories and having different structure. The only thing that binds them together, so to speak, is the fact that they are all technically a part of the Predator franchise.
It is not often that a horror films appears to tickle the right nerves from the high-brow crowd of cinema critics. With 93% Rotten Tomatoes score though, it is safe to assume that Zach Cregger's Weapons from 2025 is one of those rare movies.