As Predator: Badlands enters the longlist of the 98th Academy Awards’ Visual Effects finalists, step behind the scenes through insights shared by VFX Supervisor Olivier Dumont in his in-depth interview with Art of VFX.
The 2026 Oscars VFX competition is shaping up to be one of the most unpredictable in recent memory. According to Animation Magazine, the craftsmanship and originality of each film’s visual effects stand even more under the spotlight. As Variety reports, the preliminary list of 20 contenders includes a mix of studio tentpoles and inventive franchise entries—with Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator: Badlands standing out as one of 20th Century Studios’ two major titles still in the running. Though the Academy does not publicly release its top 20, multiple sources confirmed the film’s presence among the finalists, with shortlists scheduled to be revealed on December 16 before January’s traditional VFX “bake-offs.”
Predator: Badlands offers something uniquely bold: a synthesis of practical ingenuity, alien worldbuilding, complex character animation, and a highly coordinated, multi-studio pipeline. To understand how this ambitious film came to life, Art of VFX interviewed VFX Supervisor Olivier Dumont, who discussed the conceptual foundations and technical challenges that shaped some of the year’s most striking visuals.
A Complex Pipeline Across Six Major VFX Vendors
In the interview, Olivier Dumont explained that the production partnered with a lineup of top-tier studios: Weta, Trixter, ILP, Framestore, ILM, and The Yard, supported by a strong internal team including Capital T, while Perception delivered graphic-design-driven storytelling sequences.
Weta handled the primary shared hero assets—from Dek to Thia, Bud, and the Father—creating the master models, rigs, and look-dev packages subsequently shared across studios. Secondary creature and environment assets were also distributed when helpful, balancing workload without duplicating core development.
Dumont notes that he and VFX Producer Kathy Siegel deliberately structured the project to limit unnecessary cross-studio swaps, to maintain clear ownership on sequences of high complexity. This clarity accelerated decision-making and protected quality. Indeed, Laurens Ehrmann , VFX Supervisor on the film, recently explained to Ecran Total that The Yard was entrusted with the film’s entire opening five minutes, from environment to characters, to ensure homogeneity of look.
What emerged was a tightly choreographed workflow:
- centralized master assets from Weta
- sequenced execution across six vendors
- a unified review loop ensuring continuity
- and an in-house team handling relief work and internal coordination
The result: a pipeline robust enough to support one of the franchise’s most ambitious installments.
Intricate Character VFX
Among the most talked-about achievements in Predator: Badlands is its groundbreaking character VFX, which pushed animation, creature design, and body transformation techniques further than any previous franchise entry. As Olivier Dumont explains, the team made the choice to not use full performance-capture helmets. Instead, they relied on witness cameras and high-end keyframe animation to translate emotional beats into Dek’s uniquely non-human facial structure.
Because the Predator’s mandibles, eyes, and skin movement don’t map to human anatomy, animators were empowered to interpret performances shot-by-shot, shaping micro-timing and expression to preserve emotional clarity. This pipeline required tight cross-vendor calibration, with months spent harmonizing mandible motion, eye reads, skin weighting, and timing subtleties so Dek’s performance stayed consistent across all vendors, including The Yard.
This expressive animation approach intersected with one of the film’s most complex VFX setups, highlighted by Animation Magazine: the hybrid character created from Elle Fanning’s android torso mounted on a Predator’s back. The effect involved Fanning wearing a blue-bottom garment with tracking markers along her waist, precise camera match-moves, and seamlessly blending CG limbs and torso detachments into live-action plates.
Meanwhile, the frightening antagonist Kalisk was realized entirely through keyframe creature animation, drawing inspiration from big cats and bears to craft movement that feels both grounded and alien.
Extremely Detailed Environments
One of Dumont’s early creative priorities with Dan Trachtenberg was to differentiate the film’s two planetary environments—Yautja Prime and Genna—both narratively and visually.
Trachtenberg described Yautja Prime as a violent, geologically tormented world. Dumont explains that the team developed the planet around tilted rock plates, fractured tectonics, and vast sandfalls, meant to reflect both ancient cataclysms and the emotional desolation of the film’s Predator protagonist, Dek.
By contrast, Genna is lush, water-dominated, and biologically aggressive. Crescent-shaped cliffs, sweeping rivers, and vegetation inspired by both terrestrial biodiversity and parasitic ecosystems form the backbone of this world’s identity. The entire production drew heavily on New Zealand’s natural landscapes, abstracting them into alien variants to maximize contrast between the two worlds. According to Dumont, the goal was immediate readability: two planets, instantly distinct in “language,” tone, and emotional stakes.
Whether or not Badlands advances through December’s shortlist and January’s bake-offs, one thing is clear: the film’s artistry has already carved out a distinct place in this year’s conversation, blending franchise reinvention with some of the most thoughtful VFX craftsmanship of the season. This production that pushed artistic and technical boundaries while maintaining emotional clarity—an accomplishment that resonates strongly in the context of the Oscars’ VFX race.
Read more in the full interview of Olivier Dumont in Art of VFX here.
Pictures Courtesy of 20th Century Studios. © 2025 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.