After a pause to assess the state of real-world technology, it looks like James Cameron is once again working on a new Terminator project.
It’s been around a year since news emerged that James Cameron was working on a new Terminator project. While the series’ quality has taken something of a one-way dip over the years, the strength of those first two films, 1984’s The Terminator and 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, remain undeniable. Plus, the richness of Cameron’s original concept about a future war with sentient AI remains as inventive and rich as it ever did, especially as we’re now living in the era of AI (sort of – it isn’t sentient just yet), giving Cameron’s films a sense of even direr prescience.
The rights to the franchise were set to revert back to its original creators Cameron and Gale Ann Hurd a couple of years ago, and only last year, Cameron announced that he was indeed working on a new project based on The Terminator. Interestingly, he said that he’d paused writing for a while to see where real-world AI was going. The filmmaker seems to be back on the project, however, and while remaining pretty tight-lipped about it, did confirm that the project is still alive, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “I’m working on my own Terminator stuff right now.”
Cameron was using the distinction ‘my own’ to make clear that he isn’t involved with the upcoming prequel anime series, Terminator Zero, although he did add that he’s curious about the Netflix show, stating:
“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.
Podcast | Episode 400: The Terminator (1984), with Gale Ann Hurd
“I’d be curious to see what they’ve come up with. 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.”
When asked by the trade if he could reveal any more about his Terminator project, Cameron’s shutdown was instant:
“It’s totally classified,” he states. “I don’t want to have to send out a potentially dangerous robotic agent if you were to talk about it, even retroactively.”
Yikes – remind us not to ask Mr Cameron too many questions should we ever bump into him. Terminator Zero is to stream on Netflix from the 29th August, as proven by its recent teaser trailer.
It’s possible, meanwhile that we’ll see a Cameron-penned Terminator movie at some point. It’s likely that he won’t direct given his commitment to the Avatar films, such as the upcoming Avatar: Fire And Ash, and Linda Hamilton has said that she won’t return to the series. Still, it’s all rather exciting. When we hear more, we’ll let you know.
