hand grenade: To answer your question, there's no 'Blooded' predators, because they have been send on what they call "The Coming of Age", which is basically how they pass from 'young Bloods' to 'Blooded'... If there were Elders or others of higher class, there would be less honor in the ritual, as they are there to prove themselves as good combatants... It's like their first 'Great Hunt'. The fact that they can only rely on their skills and their partners is part of the ritual... if there's any trouble, they have to find their own way out, they can't rely on anyone else than themselves ( think of this as in a big training excercise, like it the army ) The Elders are eventually going to come 'get them back' after a certain amount of time, but of course, they won't wait long... if they survived, they take them home, if not... they failed the test. In the world of the predators, it's like "Survival of the Fittest" or "Only the Strongest survive", they don't leave much space for any kind of mistakes and they don't like failure... About your 'Unique Mask' theory... There's not any specific rituals after which the predators get a mask, as they can get it as soon as they start to hunt. Although I know that the ones with 'royal' blood tend to have more 'extravagant' and more high-tech mask than most others ( in order for the other preds to notice them more ), there's no particular ways to get specific masks... I think that most of them have been customized by the preds themselves and will change according to the settings/environments/needs of the preds. So, in other words, they don't get their masks through any kind of 'ritual' or by climbing the hierachic ladder of their society... as they NEED it as soon as they start to hunt and the reason behind the many types of masks is based on the preds personal choices... Concerning where the preds come from: THE REAL PREDATOR is right... they never actually NAMED the place where the preds are from... the only thing we know is that it's from the "deepest corners of the universe". I really think it's a good idea that they try to keep their world, origins, etc. a secret, as it makes them all the more interesting... and Paul Anderson knows that and that's why he decided not to touch those subjects in the movie. It's the same thing with the aliens... if we knew everything about them... where they are from, what they think, why they do what they do, it would 'take away' the feeling of mistery you have when you see them... the fact that they are so secretive and dark makes them a lot cooler. **SIDENOTE** I watched the trailer again in really slow motion and I think that the guy that is 'trapped' in the net in pics 25-26 is Max Stafford ( the black guy, which I think is like a commando or something like that ) He's played by Colin Salmon, who also played in Resident Evil, etc. The thing that I think is weird is that the net doesn't really look like the pred's ( as it is made of metal-like wires ), unlike this one, which looks like regular strings... Maybe it's Paul's version of the pred's net... or it might only be the angle we see it from that makes it look different, as the guy doesn't seem to be moving much ( he kinda looks messed up
) Concerning the pred in pic 27: If you watch the trailer in slow motion, just before we see the girl jump over the big gap, in the very last 'glipse' of the predator/alien fight that we see, we can somewhat see the front part of the pred's mask and it looks like the bug-type mask pred ( Scar pred ) and we also see that he has a 'scratch' a.k.a. scar on his mask made by what seems to be an alien ( of course ). So, that's for all you people that have trouble believing that the 'bug-like' pred could be the Scar pred, as maybe his name refers to THAT PARTICULAR 'scratch' made to him by the alien... So, that could emply that he could actually be the 'hero' pred of the movie... or not. The other scenes that we see of him could be from the beginning of the movie, before he actually gets his 'scar'... in one of the first pics of him, we even seem to see what looks like snow in the background, which could emply that it's when they arrive... Long live Z and k!