Shane Black Jokingly Teases 'The Predator' Characters' Deaths in New Cast Photo

Shane Black is following up The Nice Guys (one of 2016’s best) with next year’s The Predator, a blockbuster reboot of the franchise that dates all the way back to 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s jungle-set original. The filmmaker has already announced that his take will be an R-rated affair, and now, in a new cast photo he posted to Twitter yesterday (see it above), he’s begun teasing — jokingly — which of his many human protagonists will perish.

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The new photo features Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Thomas Jane, Keegan-Michael Key, Alfie Allen, and Augusto Aguilera in what appears to be a bus retrofitted with benches. While the director’s tweet praises his stars for their acting ability, he also makes a pun-ny joke about which of them will meet their maker at the hands of the Predator, whose path they’ll be unfortunate enough to cross. No doubt all of them will not survive The Predator challenge, although at this early stage, it’s way too soon to place any bets on anyone’s fate — although the comic-relief guy is often a long shot to make it to the end in such sagas, so what are the odds on Key’s character making it to the end credits?

Regardless of how its individual characters fare, there’s little doubt The Predator (see the first cast photo tweeted out earlier by Black directly above) will bring some kill-or-be-killed action to multiplexes when it debuts in theaters on Feb. 9, 2018.

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