Predator Timeline: Every Film in Chronological Order

The Predator timeline runs across nine films, and the earliest event on screen is the Viking raid that opens Predator: Killer of Killers in the year 841. Story order and release order are very different here, because the franchise spent its last few years looking backward. If you only want the sequence to press play on, this is it:

1. Predator: Killer of Killers (2025), which opens in 841 and also visits 1609 and 1942.
2. Prey (2022), set in 1719.
3. Predator (1987).
4. Predator 2 (1990), set in 1997.
5. AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004).
6. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007).
7. Predators (2010).
8. The Predator (2018).
9. Predator: Badlands (2025).

Two of those are Alien crossovers, and the rest follow the Yautja, the species of hunters behind every mask. If you are deciding what to press play on first, the predator movies in order guide sets release order beside story order. Each film below gets its own entry in story order, with spoilers flagged, and a closing section explains how the pieces fit.

Predator: Killer of Killers (2025), directed by Dan Trachtenberg, opens the timeline because its first story is set in 841. It is an animated anthology of three hunts, and it reached Hulu on June 6, 2025.

In 841, the Viking warrior Ursa and her son Anders raid the clan of Zoran, the chief who once forced Ursa to kill her own father. A Predator hits them with a sonic weapon, and Ursa kills it underwater, though Anders dies of his wounds. In 1609 Japan, two brothers, Kenji and Kiyoshi, fight over their father's lordship. Kiyoshi wins and scars Kenji, who becomes a shinobi and returns twenty years later. A Predator cuts into their duel, the brothers kill it together, and Kiyoshi dies in Kenji's arms.

The 1942 story gives the timeline its World War II entry. Mechanic John Torres is drafted into the US Navy under Captain Vandy, a Predator pilot destroys most of the squadron, Vandy sacrifices himself, and Torres tricks the creature into blowing itself up with a harpoon.

The present day frame then collects all three. Years after the war a Predator ship abducts Torres, and he wakes beside Ursa and Kenji in cells, each wearing an explosive collar. A warlord called the Grendel King forces them to fight in a desert arena, and they turn on him instead. Ursa gives her life so the others can flee, and she goes back into cryogenic storage among other captured fighters, including Naru from Prey (2022). An extended ending added on July 25, 2025 also shows Dutch Schaefer and Mike Harrigan among the frozen captives.

Prey (2022), directed by Dan Trachtenberg, takes place in 1719 on the Great Plains. It debuted on Hulu on August 5, 2022, and the 20th Century Studios release was filmed in Alberta.

Naru is a young Comanche healer who wants to prove herself as a hunter, though her brother Taabe and the other men doubt her. She reads a bright streak in the sky as a sign from the Thunderbird, and then she finds odd tracks and kills in the wilderness. After a mountain lion injures a hunter, Taabe kills the cat and becomes war chief. Naru survives a bog and a bear before French fur trappers capture her, and the cloaked Predator slaughters most of them. A trapper named Raphael teaches her to use a flintlock pistol, but the creature kills him, and Taabe dies fighting it too.

Naru wins by luring the Predator into a bog and turning its own mask and weapon against it. She carries its trophy home, is named a war chief, and tells the tribe it is time to move on. Over the end credits, ledger style artwork shows Predator ships descending toward the tribe. Killer of Killers later confirms that Naru ended up in a Predator ship's stasis pod.

Predator (1987), directed by John McTiernan, is the film that began the franchise in theaters on June 12, 1987, and it sits third in story order. Major Alan 'Dutch' Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) leads a team of mercenaries into a Central American jungle on what they are told is a hostage rescue. They find the skinned remains of earlier soldiers, destroy a guerrilla camp and take a prisoner named Anna. Dutch then learns from his old friend Dillon that the hostage story was a cover and the mission was about wiping out the guerrillas.

As the group heads for extraction, an unseen hunter that can turn nearly invisible and sees heat picks them off one at a time. Dillon dies, the others fall, and only Dutch is left. He covers himself in mud to hide his body heat and builds traps. He wounds the creature, which makes its cloaking fail, but the river sweeps away his advantage, and the creature removes its mask and fights him hand to hand. Dutch finally drops a heavy log on it. The dying creature sets off a self destruct device, and Dutch clears the blast. A helicopter picks him up the next morning with Anna aboard. The film ends with the idea of other hunters visiting Earth left open.

Predator 2 (1990), directed by Stephen Hopkins, is set in 1997 and moves the hunt from the jungle to a Los Angeles baking in a record heat wave. Colombian and Jamaican drug gangs are at war, and a Predator starts killing gang members and the police in its way. Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover), a headstrong cop who ignores orders, works with detectives Leona Cantrell, Danny Archuleta and Jerry Lambert. Special Agent Peter Keyes (Gary Busey) leads a mysterious federal task force that shuts Harrigan out and is secretly trying to capture the creature alive.

The Predator kills Archuleta, kills the Jamaican boss King Willie and takes his head as a trophy, and it ambushes Cantrell and Lambert on a subway train. It kills Lambert but spares Cantrell once its scanners show she is pregnant. Keyes's slaughterhouse trap fails, and Keyes dies when the creature throws a disc at him. Harrigan then chases the Predator across a rooftop, cuts off its self destruct device and follows it into an underground spacecraft, where he kills it with its own disc.

A group of cloaked Predators collects the body, and their leader gives Harrigan an antique flintlock pistol engraved "Raphael Adolini 1715" as a reward.

AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, is where the Alien side first enters the timeline, right after Predator 2. A satellite spots a heat source under the ice of Bouvet Island, and the terminally ill billionaire Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) funds an expedition. His team includes the guide Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan) and the archaeologist Sebastian de Rosa, and they reach an abandoned whaling station sitting above a buried pyramid.

The Predators get there first, kill the surface crew and melt a route down through the ice. Below, the humans find skeletons with ruptured rib cages, and their arrival wakes a Queen Alien. Facehuggers implant people, adult Xenomorphs burst out, and the pyramid's moving walls scatter the survivors. Sebastian reads the carvings and learns that Predators have long run the pyramid as a rite of passage, using humans as hosts for the prey.

Alexa concludes the Predators have to win, since an escaped Alien would endanger the planet, and she allies with Scar, the last Predator standing. His wrist bomb levels the pyramid, and the pair send the Queen over a cliff into the sea on a chain anchored to a water tower. She mortally wounds Scar first. Elder Predators then mark Alexa's face and give her a spear, and on their ship a hybrid bursts from Scar's body, which is the thread the next film picks up.

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), directed by Colin Strause and Greg Strause, comes next because it picks up the hybrid story. A Predator ship carrying a dead hunter and captured facehuggers is overrun when a hybrid of Predator and Alien hatches and kills the crew. The ship crashes near Gunnison, Colorado, and the hybrid and the facehuggers spread into the woods and sewers, infecting locals.

A veteran Predator receives the ship's distress signal and travels to Earth to clean up. He destroys the wreck, tracks the creatures through the sewers and into a power plant, and his weapon fire knocks out power for the whole town. Aliens attack a group of teenagers at the school pool and kill Kelly O'Brien's husband Tim, and Kelly escapes with her daughter Molly. Dallas Howard, his brother Ricky, Kelly and other survivors gather at a sporting goods store and arm themselves.

The survivors head for a helicopter evacuation on the hospital roof and find the hybrid building a hive there. The Predator and the hybrid fatally wound each other during the fight, and the military drops a tactical nuclear bomb on the town. Dallas, Ricky, Kelly and Molly survive the helicopter crash and are rescued. Afterward, Colonel Stevens hands the Predator's plasma pistol to Ms. Yutani, a representative of the Yutani corporation.

Predators (2010), directed by Nimród Antal, is the first main film set off Earth, and it follows Requiem in story order. Royce (Adrien Brody), a hardened mercenary, wakes up falling through the sky and lands in a dense jungle with seven other strangers: a cartel enforcer, a Russian soldier, an Israeli sniper, a Sierra Leonean fighter, a death row inmate, a Yakuza killer and a doctor. They find a strange monument, empty cages and traps, and then they see planets in the sky and realize they are not on Earth.

The planet is a game preserve where they are the prey. Three larger Predators called Tracker, Berserker and Falconer hunt them, and the group meets Noland (Laurence Fishburne), a soldier who has survived alone for years. Noland explains that the larger Predators are feuding with a smaller clan, and Royce plans to free a captive Predator so it will fly them home. Noland turns on them and is killed by Tracker, and the group is whittled down by sacrifices and traps.

Edwin is revealed to be a serial killer who means to stay, and Royce, who survived, returns to stop him. Royce and Isabelle kill Berserker together. They see more parachutes falling from the sky, and the two head deeper into the jungle to look for a way home.

The Predator (2018), directed by Shane Black, brings the hunt back to Earth and is eighth in story order. Army sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) witnesses a Predator ship crash and posts pieces of its armor to his home as proof. Agent Will Traeger detains him and holds the captured alien in a lab. Quinn's son Rory opens the package and begins playing with the gear.

The lab prisoner breaks loose, and Rory, in the stolen armor, lures in further Predators. A far bigger one lands, kills the first and carries Rory to its ship, which it intends to destroy. Nebraska Williams gives his life to bring the vessel down, Nettles dies in the crash, and Quinn and Casey Brackett finish off the giant.

The last scene has a lab crew opening cargo from the wreck and finding a 'Predator Killer' exo-suit. Quinn agrees to pilot it, which leaves the timeline pointing toward fights the franchise has not yet shown.

Predator: Badlands (2025), directed by Dan Trachtenberg, is the last film in chronological order. Dek is a young Yautja, the runt of his clan, and his father casts him out. He crash lands on the deadly planet Genna, hoping to earn his place by killing the Kalisk, a creature no hunter has beaten. There he meets Thia, a damaged synthetic made by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, and the two cross the hostile terrain together.

Along the way Dek befriends Bud, a young Kalisk. Thia's "sister" synthetic, Tessa, pursues them because the company wants the Kalisk's regenerative abilities. Dek's view of the strict Yautja code slowly changes as he values friendship over brute strength. Thia turns against Weyland-Yutani, and the company's research on Genna is destroyed. Dek defeats Tessa and returns home, where his father rejects the kill he brings back. Dek wins the fight, Bud kills the father, and the three set up their own clan.

A short scene after the title card shows the old clan preparing to attack as a large ship appears on the horizon. Dek says it is his mother. Badlands ties itself to the Alien side through Thia and the Weyland-Yutani corporation, and Alison Wright is credited as the voice of MU/TH/UR. For what comes next, read about the new Predator movie.

The Predator timeline holds together as one continuity, and in my opinion the cleanest way to read it is as a long running hunt that the franchise keeps rediscovering. The best proof is Killer of Killers, whose closing stasis pods hold Naru from Prey (2022) and, in the extended ending, Dutch Schaefer and Mike Harrigan. That puts a Comanche healer, a mercenary major and a Los Angeles cop in the same collection of captured champions, and it makes the two 20th century films part of an organized Yautja tradition after the fact.

There is a smaller echo between two films. Predator 2 ends with a Predator leader handing Harrigan a flintlock pistol engraved "Raphael Adolini 1715", and Prey (2022) features a trapper named Raphael who teaches Naru to use a flintlock in 1719. It could be argued that this is a deliberate nod, but neither film states a link, so I would treat it as a fan theory and not a fact.

The Alien connection is where most readers get lost. AVP: Alien vs. Predator ends with a hybrid bursting from Scar's chest, and Requiem opens with that kind of hybrid killing a ship's crew before the Predator ship crashes in Colorado. Requiem then closes on Colonel Stevens passing the plasma pistol to Ms. Yutani. In my opinion that is the thread leading to Badlands, which brings in Thia and Weyland-Yutani, though no film states the link outright. So, are the Yautja and the xenomorphs in the same universe? The films put both species in the same story, and the corporation is the likeliest thread.

The messiest placement is the 2010 and 2018 pair. Predators happens on a game preserve planet and The Predator is set on Earth, and I place both after Requiem in this order. That being said, I would watch in release order the first time, because the surprise of the 1987 jungle matters, and then use story order for a rewatch. If you want to start with the strongest modern entry, begin with Prey (2022), which needs no homework. The predator movies ranked list makes the full case.