How a 1987 Handshake Became the Internet's Favorite Meme
Predator has a lot going for it. The jungle. The heat vision. The countdown. But the scene the internet kept is not in the jungle at all. It happens early, before anyone gets on a helicopter, between two old friends who have not seen each other in a while.
Dutch sees Dillon. He says his name. They meet in the middle.
You know the rest.
The scene
The greeting starts as a hand slap and turns into an arm-wrestle. Palms locked. Elbows up. Biceps doing most of the talking. Neither man lets go and neither man mentions it. Then they talk about the job.
That is the whole bit. A few seconds of screen time, no setup, no payoff.
It matters more than it looks. Dillon is Dutch's ally from Vietnam, now working for the CIA. Before the first act is over, he will have lied to Dutch about the mission. The handshake is the last time the two men are clearly on the same side. Then the movie moves on.
Predator opened in the US on June 12, 1987. John McTiernan directed. Carl Weathers, already Apollo Creed to most of the audience, was the producers' first choice for Dillon. Good call.
2007: YouTube does a remake
For twenty years, the handshake was just a good moment in a good movie. Then YouTube arrived and people started filming things in their backyards.
On August 25, 2007, Kristian Odland uploaded "A Tribute to The Handshake in Predator," a shot-for-shot remake of the scene, according to Know Your Meme and the Daily Dot. The parodies followed. One cut the original to Paul Engemann's 1983 song "Push It to the Limit." One scored it with Guile's theme from Street Fighter II. One ended the handshake in a nuclear explosion.
None of this was strange. The scene already played like a montage moment. People just added the music.
2012: the art
In 2012, the handshake picked up a fan art phase. Rory Dean posted a painting of it on Flickr. DeviantArt user MILOSLAVvonRANDA posted a chalk drawing titled "EPIC handshake by Dillon and Dutch."
That second one turned out to be important. A clean drawing of two arms and one grip, with no faces to get in the way, is not just fan art. It is a template. Nobody used it that way yet.
2018: the labels go on
Know Your Meme dates the earliest known labeled version to May 14, 2018, on Twitter. Someone wrote a word on each arm and a third word on the grip. That was the whole innovation.
By July 2018 the format was everywhere. In August, the Daily Dot reported that the handshake was back, this time as an object-labeling meme. Their examples included punks and rappers shaking on the same opinion. In April 2019, TikTok users started acting it out with a shared sound, which put the format back where it started: two people, one grip, filmed.
The internet calls it the Epic Handshake. Fans of the movie still call it the Predator handshake. Both are correct.
How it's used
The rules are simple. Label the left arm. Label the right arm. Label the grip.
The two arms are parties that should have nothing in common. The grip is the one thing they agree on. The joke lives in the gap between them. The wider the gap, the better the meme.
A DeepCut example:
- Left arm: people who own a 4K projector
- Right arm: people who still have the VHS
- The grip: Predator is the best movie of 1987
Another:
- Left arm: film critics
- Right arm: guys who quote Heat at barbecues
- The grip: the downtown shootout
It also works the other way. Some versions use the grip as a contest, not a truce. Two parties straining over the same thing. That reading is closer to the movie.
Why it works
It needs no context. You do not have to have seen Predator to read it. Two arms, one point of contact. It is a diagram with biceps.
It is symmetrical. Neither arm is winning. The image shows two equals, which is exactly what agreement is supposed to look like.
It is overcommitted. A handshake is the smallest gesture two people can share. This one is a feat of strength. Taking a small thing far too seriously is most of what made the action movies of that decade fun, and this scene does it in a few seconds.
And it is earned. These were two very large men. Weathers had played linebacker in the NFL before acting. Schwarzenegger had been a bodybuilder. Nobody in the shot is faking the arms.
The last handshake
Carl Weathers died on February 1, 2024. He was 76. Schwarzenegger posted a tribute on Instagram that included the handshake. "Carl Weathers will always be a legend," he wrote.
Know Your Meme published an explainer on the meme the next day. A meme site writing up a 37-year-old scene on the day the news broke tells you where the handshake ended up. Not as a joke about the movie. As the thing people reach for when they mean two sides, one grip.
Wear it
The Predator Handshake T-Shirt is the scene with nothing else on it: two forearms locked mid-grip in comic-book ink, motion lines left in. No labels. You can supply your own.
If you are more of a three-man-crew person, the Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Willis Action Trio T-Shirt puts Dutch's leading man next to the other two you would call. And for the barbecue crowd from the example above, there is the Heat The Action Is the Juice T-Shirt.
Two arms. One grip. Still holding.