The popularity of Predator is both the premise, and not assuming the audience are complete idiots, and providing them just enough information for the audience to figure it all out, without the movie explicitly spelling it out.

Going into the movie, audience isn't sure if what was killing the commandos was some kind of 'monster', magical entity, etc.

The suspense and trying to piece together "Just wtf is it that's hunting them an why" is the entire point of the movie.

As the information slowly trickles in, we find out that it is an alien species on a safari hunt. Because why not? It makes perfect sense that we drop into a different world 'jungle' and hunt big dangerous game. Why couldn't an alien species want to do the same?

Why wouldn't an alien species want 'sport' in that manner and only hunt the armed males.

And the movie explained all of this, without some random character just saying all of that information out loud to explain it to the audience. We piece that together ourselves.

This is why Predator movies as of late fall flat on their face.

We already know what it is, and why its there. So everything after that is pointless.

Predator 2 was 'slightly' interesting, as it filled in some gaps on the species itself.

• is there more than 1
• do they hunt other things?
• what kind of other technology do they have?

But beyond that, any Predator movie afterwards is a complete waste of time, unless it's an audience member going into something like "Prey" completely blind to what a Predator even is, and/or has never seen any previous movie.

Once you see the first movie and know the premise (or know the premise before ever going into it), the magic of it is already gone.