6. Strong Female Characters

Doomsday might not have been Marshall’s finest hour but it continued something he started with The Descent – meaty leading roles for women.

We’d hope he could bring something truly revolutionary to the Predator series – a Ripley-like female character, perhaps.

“I’m only interested in doing stories if I’m involved in the characters, because the characters take you through the story.

“With Dog Soldiers, I told the cast, ‘This is a soldiers movie with werewolves. It’s not a werewolf movie with soldiers.’ It was absolutely basic to me that these soldiers had to be realistic, three-dimensional, involving characters, and their story had to be something that we wanted to go with.

“Same with The Descent: The through-line was that it was Sara’s story, about the loss of her family and eventually the loss of her mind.

“In Doomsday, the emotional core to the movie is Major Sinclair’s story, which starts off in the present as a little girl and is resolved thirty years in the future. Everything else grows around that. So the characters are very important to me.”

Next: The Rodriguez Effect