A Terminator Reboot Is in Early Discussion, according to James Cameron

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Image: StudioCanal

The last Terminator film didn’t do too well at the box office, but the franchise may—as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s iconic T-800 likes to say—”be back” again, according to director James Cameron, who recently sat down with the SmartLess crew for a podcast dated December 19 and shared some news regarding the property, which might be rebooted yet again following previous attempts that include 2015’s Terminator Genisys, starring Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese and Emilia Clarke as Sarah Connor.

“If I were to do another Terminator film and maybe try and to launch that franchise again, which is in discussion, but nothing has been decided, I would make it much more about the AI side of it than bad robots gone crazy,” the 68-year-old filmmaker revealed.

Cameron hasn’t directed a Terminator film since Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which released in 1991 and remains not only one of the best movies in the franchise, but also in the sci-fi action genre, according to critics.

In a recent interview with Deadline, Cameron suggested that Terminator: Dark Fate failed because he insisted on putting Arnold into the film, something that director Tim Miller (Deadpool) wasn’t thrilled about:

I think the problem, and I’m going to wear this one, is that I refused to do it without Arnold. Tim didn’t want Arnold, but I said, “Look, I don’t want that. Arnold and I have been friends for 40 years, and I could hear it, and it would go like this: ‘Jim, I can’t believe you’re making a Terminator movie without me.’” It just didn’t mean that much to me to do it, but I said, “If you guys could see your way clear to bringing Arnold back and then, you know, I’d be happy to be involved.”

Cameron went on to suggest that Terminator: Dark Fate was bogged down by having too many old people, noting the ages of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton, who are now 75 and 66 years old, respectively.

I think what happened is I think the movie could have survived having Linda in it, I think it could have survived having Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she’s 60-something, he’s 70-something, all of a sudden it wasn’t your Terminator movie, it wasn’t even your dad’s Terminator movie, it was your granddad’s Terminator movie. And we didn’t see that. We loved it, we thought it was cool, you know, that we were making this sort of direct sequel to a movie that came out in 1991. And young moviegoing audiences weren’t born. They wouldn’t even have been born for another 10 years.

Terminator: Dark Fate has been described as a flop by both critics and analysts, having earned a relatively disappointing $261.1 million worldwide, according to numbers shared by Box Office Mojo.

Terminator: Resistance, a first-person shooter set during the Future War that was first introduced at the beginning of the original Terminator film, was released by Teyon on November 14, 2019, and has since received positive reviews from Terminator fans.

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Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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