Edward James Olmos Has Been Cut From The Predator

Edward James Olmos (Battlestar Galactica) has revealed to Slashfilm that his character in the upcoming 20th Century Fox sequel The Predator is officially not included in the final cut of the movie. Olmos was supposed to play a four-star general, but according to him his role wasn’t relevant to the story so director Shane Black (Iron Man 3) ultimately made the hard decision to remove Olmos’ scenes in the film.

“I’m not in the show though—It was too long so my character, they had to take me out,” Olmos said in an interview during the publicity rounds for his new FX show Mayans M.C. “They were like half an hour, 3/4 of an hour too long. So I understand why. It was gracious of them to call me and tell me, ‘Hey, we really feel bad,’ you know?”

Black recently revealed to Collider the full extent of recent large-scale reshoots on The Predator and why they decided to re-do most of the film’s third act.

“If you want to do all of this stuff with this much money, you probably need to shoot during the day because during the night would be prohibitive,” Black said. “To our chagrin, and it’s on me, when we saw the footage during the day, the climax of the movie, it doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look scary in the daytime. Then we decided to streamline the plot so we could go back up and really concentrate on the scarier elements of doing it at night. So literally, as they’ve said, the difference is night and day. We took everything out of day and put it into darkness.”

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From the outer reaches of space to the small-town streets of suburbia, the hunt comes home in Black’s explosive reinvention of the Predator series. Now, the universe’s most lethal hunters are stronger, smarter and deadlier than ever before, having genetically upgraded themselves with DNA from other species. When a young boy accidentally triggers their return to Earth, only a ragtag crew of ex-soldiers and a disgruntled science teacher can prevent the end of the human race.

The Predator cast includes Boyd Holbrook (Logan), Trevante Rhodes (Moonlight), Jacob Tremblay (Room, Wonder), Keegan-Michael Key (Tomorrowland), Olivia Munn (X-Men: Apocalypse), Sterling K. Brown (This is Us), Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones), Thomas Jane (The Mist), Augusto Aguilera, Jake Busey, and Yvonne Strahovski (The Handmaid’s Tale).

Black, who wrote the script with his Monster Squad co-writer Fred Dekker, has confirmed that the film remains in the continuity of the first two movies and isn’t a full reboot of the series. He said there is a reference in the script as to why the film has a singular title, and that the film will carry an R rating.

The original Predator was directed by McTiernan and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as the leader of a United States special forces team that comes under attack from an alien entity that prizes the thrill of the hunt above all else. It was followed by a direct sequel, Predator 2, in 1990 before crossing over with Fox’s Alien franchise for two additional sequels, Alien vs. Predator and AvP: Requiem. In 2010, Nimrod Antal helmed a reboot with a new feature, Predators.

The Predator will open in theaters on September 14.

( Photo Credit: Getty Images)