The Real Reason The Predator Killed Shane Black’s Hawkins First

Nearly 40 years later, “Predator” remains the benchmark for subversive gender-bending. At first, director John McTiernan’s 1987 classic seems like your typical ’80s testosterone fest, with Arnold Schwarzenegger showing up alongside other musclemen and gleefully killing nameless bad guys (but not without throwing a wink). Only then does the sword of Damocles that marks the film’s opening, in which something from space is shown entering Earth’s atmosphere, collapse. With that, the film seamlessly transforms into a sci-fi slasher set in the jungles of Central America, with Arnold’s Dutchman and his paramilitary comrades becoming more or less the equivalent of Laurie Strode and the other teenage girls in John Carpenter’s “Halloween.” (Although I’m pretty sure Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t poop his pants while preparing this movie, unlike a certain “Predator” star.)

Just as Dutch evolves into the film’s Final Girl, it doesn’t take long for Shane Black’s wiseguy Rick Hawkins to become the titular alien hunter’s first victim. And given that Black had just sold the script for “Lethal Weapon” — another convention-breaking ’80s project full of sharp writing and action — shortly before working on “Predator,” you’d be forgiven for assuming he must have had a hand in writing the script for his character’s shocking demise. Except that apparently wasn’t the case. On the contrary, when interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter for its oral history of the film in 2017, producer John Davis indicated that Black was primarily recruited to make revisions on the script credited to Jim and John Thomas. Black, however, insisted he was just there to act.

So how did the other “Predator” creators take this? By having Black make history as the first person to die at the mandibles of a predator (aka a Yautja) on screen.

In his defense, Black was already juggling multiple projects when he agreed to work on “Predator,” including rewriting “Lethal Weapon,” itself his first produced screenplay. So you can understand why he would have preferred “Predator” to remain purely an acting role, especially when he wasn’t sure whether his writing career was about to take off or explode during takeoff. Nonetheless, it seems that the film’s producers were primarily interested in his off-screen talents. As Davis recalled:

“[…] I met Shane on [1987’s ‘Predator’]. Shane was a great writer who had just written this great screenplay called “Lethal Weapon.” We wanted him to do a rewrite on the [‘Predator’] scenario. So we put him in the movie, because he’s an actor. And we took him there, and we asked him to do a rewrite, and he said he was an actor in the movie and not a writer. So this is the first person we killed. He was killed seven minutes into the film.”

To be fair, being the first Yautja victim in a “Predator” movie is no small honor, so the film’s producers really did Black a favor (even if that wasn’t their intention). Black himself didn’t seem to hold too many hard feelings either, considering he returned to the franchise three decades later to co-write and direct the 2018 sequel “The Predator.” Unfortunately, much of Black’s goodwill for the property was likely extinguished by his experience making that film, which did not fare well after being heavily retooled during post-production (as he and “The Predator” co-writer Fred Dekker have since discussed in more depth). But hey, he’s still number one in the Predator. No one can take that away from him.