With a new Terminator on its way for a July 26, 2019 release, returning star Arnold Schwarzenegger has told Business Insider how director Tim Miller and series creator/producer James Cameron plan to fix the moribund franchise.
“I think Cameron and Tim came up with a concept where they can continue on with the T-800 but make a whole new movie,” Schwarzenegger said. “What they are doing now with this one is basically to just take a few very basic characters, like Linda Hamilton’s character and my character, and dismiss everything else. Just move away from all these rules of the timeline and other characters.”
Director Miller previously explained how Schwarzenegger’s aging Terminator will evolve in the new movie.
“Even in ‘Genisys,’ he was a slightly gussied-up version of the old Terminator,” said Miller. “I think we should embrace his age, and that’s what’s going to make it interesting and fresh for the fans.”
Re-teaming with Schwarzenegger after starring together in both the original Terminator in 1984 and the 1991 sequel, Linda Hamilton will return to the franchise as a “seasoned warrior” version of Sarah Connor. Miller and Cameron hope the new Terminator movie — which will ignore Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys — will lead to a new trilogy of films, with a writers room that includes David Goyer (Batman Begins), Charles Eglee (Dark Angel) and Josh Friedman (Avatar sequels), the latter of whom created the Terminator spin-off The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
“We’re starting a search for an 18-something woman to be the new centerpiece of the new story,” Cameron previously said. “We still fold time. We will have characters from the future and the present. There will be mostly new characters, but we’ll have Arnold and Linda’s characters to anchor it.”
Cameron, who will regain the Terminator rights in 2019, is producing the new film series which has Deadpool director Tim Miller and David Ellison of Skydance teaming up.
Cameron originally sold the rights to the original film for $1 to producer Gale Anne Hurd, with the agreement that he would be allowed to direct The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The first film earned $78.4 million worldwide and was topped by Cameron’s highly-acclaimed sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which grossed $519.8 million worldwide. Cameron stepped away from the franchise after that film, though three more were made, with the most recent one, Terminator Genisys, having earned $440.6 million globally (though only $89.8 million of that was domestic) on a $155 million budget.
