Predator (Yautja)

On the Northern Plains in 1719, a ship drops off a Predator to hunt. It works its way up the food chain: snakes, wolves, a bear. Naru, a young Comanche woman who wants to be a hunter, reads the signs before anyone else and starts studying it.

The Predator slaughters the hunters led by her brother, Taabe, and a band of French trappers. Naru figures out it can't see anything without body heat and uses a plant that cools her down. In the end, she lures it into a bog and beats it with its own technology. A flintlock pistol the French were carrying stays in this story and comes back later.

Dutch Schaefer and his rescue team are sent into a Central American jungle on a mission that turns out to be a CIA setup. On the way out, something invisible starts killing the team and hanging skinned bodies from the trees.

The Predator sees in thermal, laughs in the voices of the soldiers it has killed and leaves Anna, the unarmed prisoner, alone. On his own, Dutch stumbles onto the fact that mud hides him from the alien. He sets traps in the jungle. The Predator pulls off its mask to fight him hand to hand and ends up crushed by a trap. Beaten, it arms the bomb on its wrist and laughs. Dutch runs and survives the blast.

In a Los Angeles gripped by a heat wave and a gang war, a Predator picks the city as its hunting ground. Lieutenant Mike Harrigan investigates the killings and runs into federal agent Peter Keyes, who has been studying the creature for years and wants to trap it in a meatpacking plant.

The trap fails. Harrigan chases the Predator across the rooftops and kills it with its own bladed disc inside its ship, hidden underground. He sees the trophy room, with an alien skull among the prizes. More Predators show up, collect the body and, instead of killing Harrigan, their leader hands him a flintlock pistol engraved with 1715.

Mercenaries, soldiers and criminals wake up parachuting into an unknown jungle: Royce, Isabelle, Cuchillo, Nikolai, Mombasa, Stans, Hanzo and the doctor Edwin. They soon realize they're on another planet, a preserve where Predators drop prey to hunt.

Three bigger Predators, the Super Predators, live there and keep a classic Predator tied up. Noland, a soldier who has survived on the planet for years, explains that the two breeds have a blood feud. Royce frees the prisoner in exchange for its ship, but a Super Predator kills it. In the end, Royce and Isabelle see more parachutes coming down and head deeper into the jungle.

A fugitive Predator crash-lands in Mexico, and sniper Quinn McKenna, after seeing it, mails pieces of its armor home. His son, Rory, ends up playing with the gear and drawing attention. The government captures the alien, and biologist Casey Bracket finds human DNA in it.

A second Predator, much bigger and genetically upgraded, arrives to kill the fugitive. The theory is that the species harvests DNA from others to evolve. Quinn's group kills the big one with its own weapons. On the fugitive's ship, they find a suit of armor it was bringing so humans could defend themselves.

Far in the future, Dek is a young Yautja his clan sees as a runt. His father, Njohrr, orders him killed, and his older brother dies saving him. Dek flees to Genna, the deadliest planet he knows, set on hunting the Kalisk, a beast no one has ever taken down.

There he teams up with Thia, a Weyland-Yutani synthetic who has lost her legs, and Bud, a small local creature. The company wants the Kalisk too, for its regeneration. Dek learns Bud is the Kalisk's offspring and that a leader protects his own. He beats Tessa, the synthetic running the operation, goes home and defeats his father. At the end, a ship appears in the sky: it's his mother.

The name Yautja came from outside the movies, in the 1994 novel Alien vs. Predator: Prey by Steve and Stephani Perry, and only became official in the 2025 films. Dark Horse comics have expanded the species since the late '80s. On the 1987 film, the first suit was so bad it was scrapped; Stan Winston redesigned the creature, mandibles included, and 7'2" Kevin Peter Hall took over the role from Jean-Claude Van Damme.