Not much of interest came out of TCA, but there was some good news for Terminator fans. Director McG, attending as the producer of the Human Target TV series, admitted that a sequel to Terminator Salvation was in the works.
McG announced:
"Yeah, we're working on it right now. We're very far down the line with the story for that – for the next picture, and even the picture after that, and feeling good and we'll see where that takes us. I'm prepping 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea right now and I'm looking at Spring Awakening, but also the notion of the next Terminator – I mean, we're making it. Warners is excited about it. Sony is excited about it. And we can't wait to get back at it and show the world what becomes of that war and how we master time travel because we stayed away from time travel in Salvation and I missed it. We decided it was the right thing to do and we did a lot of things right in that movie and we did many things wrong in that movie. And we'll learn from the experience and we'll grow and I think the next movie is going to be even more exciting and a better film.
When asked about the plot for the sequel, McG said:
"One of the problems is that in a post-apocalyptic world, everybody's a little bummed out because your brother melted... your friends are gone. Everything went haywire. So the idea is to play with one of the tried and true rules of the franchise – time travel – and introduce it in this picture. I don't want to share too much, but let's just say it's very, very likely that John Connor is going to end up running through rooms like this where he knows something that none of us know. And I think that is a platform for great storytelling. Because I always love it when [Kyle] Reese is in our world, as you saw in the first picture, and everybody thinks he's out of his [expletive] mind and he knows and he can't afford to be concerned. And he's got to convince someone he cares about to come with him! And that's one of the engines. And we'll have a much more clearly defined antagonist in the new picture. It will be more of a chase movie with a new Terminator that is on your ass."
McG also admitted that the Terminator TV show, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, probably hurt the film, rather than boosted it, as they had hoped it would:
"That's one of those things that we realized looking over our shoulder. I believe that we can put enough separation into our film construct where the television show would be the television show and the film will be the film. But one could also argue that (Smallville) cannibalized (Superman Returns) to some degree...it's always witchcraft. It's guess work. It's dangerous."