Another installment of The Terminator is currently in discussion according to James Cameron and he has a very particular way in mind to take the franchise if he were to take the reins over the series once more.
“If I were to do another Terminator film and maybe try 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,” Cameron revealed on the SmartLess podcast, hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett.
The commentary comes a few short days after the esteemed director The Terminator, its sequel Terminator 2: Judgement Day and the upcoming sequel to Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water shared his thoughts about the subpar critical and audience reception to the sixth installment in the Terminator franchise, 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate. The film, which was directed by Tim Miller (Deadpool, Sonic the Hedgehog) saw the return of the series’ two most notable characters, Sarah Connor (played by Linda Hamilton) and the original T-800 Terminator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) lost over $122.6 million at the box office and cast serious doubt on the future of the series.
“I think the problem, and I’m going to wear this one, is that I refused to do it without Arnold,” Cameron said in a sit-down with AV Club. “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 continued, “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.”
There are currently no definitive plans for a seventh Terminator film but a Terminator anime series produced by Ghost in the Shell studio Production I.G. and written by The Batman co-writter Mattson Tomlin is currently in the works for Netflix.
Would Cameron’s plan of a focus on Skynet and the future A.I. work if a new Terminator movie were to be made? Let us know in the comments.
