Following his recent "classified" tease, James Cameron has confirmed that new Terminator movies are in development.
Despite decent reviews, the last movie, Dark Fate, was the latest instalment in the franchise to underperform at the box office, and it was generally assumed that it'd be a very long time before we see the war against the machines continue on the big screen.
Many fans believed the saga would take a (possibly permanent) break in live-action, but Cameron recently revealed that he is developing a new Terminator project.
The legendary filmmaker shared the surprising news while speaking to THR about Netflix's animated series, Terminator Zero.
"It looks interesting. My relationship to that is very much like The Sarah Connor Chronicles — other people spinning stories in a world I set in motion is interesting to me. What’s their takeaway? What intrigued them about it? Where are they going with it? It looks like they’re going back to the root cause of Judgment Day — the nuclear war — and whether that’s an ultimate timeline. I’d be curious to see what they’ve come up with. I’m working on my own Terminator stuff right now. It’s got nothing to do with that. Like with The Sarah Connor Chronicles, they occasionally touched on things I had been playing with completely independently. So there’s some curiosity there. It’s not a burning curiosity, but, obviously, it’d be nice to see it succeed."
"It’s totally classified," he added when asked for more details. "I don’t want to have to send out a potentially dangerous robotic agent if you were to talk about it, even retroactively."
Now, Cameron has decided to share a few details during an interview with Empire, and it sounds like these films will introduce an entirely new group of characters - which means no Sarah or John Connor, and possibly even brand-new takes on the Terminators themselves (bye-bye T-800).
“You’ve got powerless main characters, essentially, fighting for their lives, who get no support from existing power structures, and have to circumvent them but somehow maintain a moral compass. And then you throw AI into the mix. Those principles are sound principles for storytelling today, right? So I have no doubt that subsequent Terminator films will not only be possible, but they’ll kick ass. But this is the moment where you jettison all the specific iconography.”
“It’s more than a plan,” he added when asked if these new movies were in the planning stages. “That’s what we’re doing. That’s all I’ll say for right now.”
What do you make of this development? Let us know in the comments section, and check out Empire's 40th anniversary Terminator covers below.