Robert Rodriguez has been talking about his job of restarting the Predator franchise with his film Predators, and just where it comes from.

What he's been saying is rather interesting, mainly because it comes from a very old script he wrote, and that its inspired by the sister franchise of Alien.

It seems that, according to Robert Rodriguez, he wrote a treatment for Predators, a sequel to Predator, way back when he made Desperado. He was asked to do it as a writing assignment and there was no real constraints, and so he wrote.

“With a nod toward Cameron's ALIENS I decided to call it PREDATORS. I set it on a jungle-like Predator planet. It was just a writing assignment, so I didn't have to worry about budget constraints or how the movie would actually get made with the technology that existed back then, so I just wrote any cool thing I could come up with.

Fast forward 15 years to when I got a call from Alex Young over at Fox, who had been digging around and found my original treatment. He was eager to get it made and re-invent the Predator franchise using the treatment as a guide. So he contacted me to see if I'd be interested in being involved”

He goes on to talk about how much he loves the original Predator, and how his own production company does too, and there's the usual praise for the original. However the real interesting stuff in the AICN story through Latino Review is what he has in line for the story and the characters.

“What I'd like to do with it is expand on ideas I dreamt up back in the original treatment, that had really expanded on the universe both the Predators and other species live in. We'd create new otherworldly characters while not taking away from the draw our main Predator has. I think another reason I called it Predators was to mark it as a project that should be taken seriously by a film-maker to make a worthy follow up to a classic, much in the way Cameron made Aliens a compelling work on its own, following Ridley Scott's Alien.”

Warning bells, “new otherworldly characters”? What was Predator about? What was Aliens about? No other creatures, creature versus human, that was it, and this comment has me concerned that the focus will be on making a rich planet filled with bizarre life forms when we really should be focussed on the Predators.

He says a few other things, and the question of Arnold Schwarzenegger does comes up, unsurprisingly, and, again unsurprisingly, there's no word since the production is so early.

I'm not sure, I'm really on the fence with this idea and while it makes a lot of sense to follow the Alien franchise in the way that the second film was a sequel of the first, I don't know if this treatment that's being talked about is the right way to go. We don't need any other creatures, we need the Predator against humans.