On the occasion of the broadcast of Terminator Genisys on CStar, we ask ourselves the following question: is a 7th film in the pipeline?
Released in cinemas on July 1, 2015, Terminator Genisys did not mark the spirits in a good way, announcing the decline of a franchise in decline. Despite the disappointment of fans, the film directed by Alan Taylor had garnered 440 million dollars in worldwide receipts for a budget of 155 million.
Subsequently, Terminator Dark Fate, released on October 23, 2019, had planted the last nail in the coffin of the saga initiated in 1984 by James Cameron. Directed by Tim Miller, the work brought together Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a convoluted and far-fetched story that baffled aficionados. With a budget of 185 million dollars, the film ultimately collected only 261 million internationally. A bitter failure.
Did you think that the Genisys and Dark Fate fiascos had sounded the death knell for the saga? Nay! At least we know Schwarzy, 76, and Linda Hamilton, 66, won’t be coming back. “The franchise isn’t over, but I’m done with it”had specified the actor in the columns of The Hollywood Reporter. For his part, James Cameron does not intend to abandon his saga.
In May 2023, at a Tech Dell World conference, the director of Avatar made an astonishing statement. The director has revealed he’s writing a new Terminator movie! However, he prefers to wait to see how artificial intelligence will evolve before going further in developing his scenario.
AI is the strong theme of the franchise, raising the question of the domination of the machine over humans. At the time of the emergence of ChatGPT and company, James Cameron would like to dig into the question in a new opus of Terminator.
Captivated by these themes, the filmmaker has recently made sensational declarations on this subject. “I warned you in 1984 and you did not listen”, chanted the creator of Terminator, warning against Artificial Intelligence, an issue also at the heart of the strike in Hollywood. However, one wonders where the filmmaker will find the time to develop the project, immersed in the site of the sequels toAvatar: The Waterway.
For his part, Arnold Schwarzenegger had also expressed his concern about this. “Nowadays everyone is afraid of it, of where it’s going to go. And in this movie, in Terminator, we’re talking about the machines that become self-aware and they take over… Now, at the over the decades, it has become a reality”, he hammered.
Note that an animated series based on the Terminator franchise has been in development since 2021 at Netflix. The project is made in partnership with Skydance, which owns the rights to the SF franchise, and Production IG, the legendary Japanese animation studio that brought us Ghost in the Shell. Screenwriter Mattson Tomlin (The Batman) is supervising the writing.
“This new animated series will explore the Terminator universe in a whole new way”, assured John Derderian, vice president of the animation department at Netflix. For the moment, no news of the project yet. We will surely have to wait until the end of the writers’ and actors’ strike which is currently paralyzing Hollywood.