It is no secret that the Yautja from Predator and the Xenomorphs from Alien have a bloody past together under their shared canon. Now that Predators have lost interest in Alien’s new planet, the two species have even more reason to fight each other.
Predators and Xenomorphs first appeared in the movies, respectively, in 1987’s Predator and 1979’s Alien.
The two alien species would not clash on screen until the 2004 film Alien vs. Predator, which established the premise that the struggle between Xenomorphs and Predators going back thousands of years. Both alien species proved to be insanely lethal in their unique ways.
Fans will learn that Predators’ whole society revolves around hunting Xenomorphs in the Alien vs. Predator books and comic book series because Yautja views killing one as a “coming-of-age” experience. Similar to how Predators are responsible for Xenomorphs’ presence on so many different planets around the cosmos, Queens are transported to other worlds by Yautja to be hunted there; each planet serves as a distinctively difficult hunting ground. The Predator race now has yet another world to hunt Xenomorphs without even requiring human intervention, yet one twist makes this planet far more unique than any other.
A spec-ops team of synthetics known as Steel Team is on a mission to rescue an Ovomorph from the planet Tobler-9, which has been overrun by Xenomorphs, in Alien #4 by Phillip Kennedy Johnson and Julius Ohta. This world was previously a fully populated terraformed planet and a scientific outpost run by Weyland-Yutani. The studies being carried out by Weyland-scientists Yutani’s involved the Xenomorph species (of course), and one of them produced a hybrid Xenomorph/mosquito that could infect people with a single bite. Instead of infecting humans with a Xenomorph embryo as a Facehugger does, Xeno-squitoes change humans into a monster that resembles a Xenomorph, effectively creating a human/Xenomorph hybrid.
Alien has combined both predators’ preferences to prey on a single planet.
One bite from a Xeno-squito can result in the creation of a human/Xenomorph hybrid, and there were lots of them in the closed Weyland-Yutani lab. Tobler-9 would become a planet full of a kind of prey the Predators have never pursued before—one that they would undoubtedly be delighted to kill—if they infected every human living there (as well as any other humans who will unavoidably explore this world in the future).
Predators hunt Xenomorphs to prove their value in the previously established fiction of Alien vs. Predator.
As established in every Predator film, novel, and comic, Predators enjoy hunting humans. As a result, Tobler-9 ought should be at the top of the Predators’ preferred hunting grounds because it is the only location in the known cosmos where two of their preferred prey are united into a single, novel organism.
On Tobler-9, there is just one human/Xenomorph hybrid, but it won’t be the last. Synthetics and Xenomorph evolution have been the two main topics of this entire Alien series. Synthetics are the major characters in Steel Team’s Alien tale, and their goal is to use experiments to learn the details of Xenomorph evolution. As a result, it is improbable that we will drop the concept of Xenomorph mutation within the context of Alien canon anytime soon; instead, it is much better likely that we will simply contain it to Tobler-9. It is good news for the Predators as it gives them a new hunting ground that, by all accounts, they should find completely irresistible.