James Cameron Teases Cryptic Plans for Terminator Franchise

The last major installment in the Terminator franchise was 2018’s Terminator: Dark Fate, and even though that movie featured key figures from the franchise’s history and earned promising critical reactions, it earned an underwhelming performance at the box office and failed to revive the series. The anime series Terminator Zero will be the next major entry in the franchise, though creator of the franchise James Cameron recently confirmed that the show has no substantial connection to any ideas he has toyed with and that he’s currently working on something for the saga. The filmmaker even went on to joke that, were he to reveal any information about it, he’d have to send out some Terminators of his own.

When asked by The Hollywood Reporter about his interest in the new anime, Cameron confessed, “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.”

He added, “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.”

The Sarah Connor Chronicles debuted in 2008 and served as a sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Even without Cameron’s own involvement, the series earned relatively positive reviews and starred Lena Headey prior to her breakout role in Game of Thrones.

When Cameron was asked about what his project will explore, he joked, “It’s totally classified. I don’t want to have to send out a potentially dangerous robotic agent if you were to talk about it, even retroactively.”

It’s worth noting that Cameron himself was involved in Dark Fate and that still didn’t directly result in a resurgence of the franchise, but given the cynicism he faced in regards to developing his followups to Avatar, it’s hard to deny the power of his storytelling abilities.

Terminator Zero hits Netflix on August 29th.

What do you think about the filmmaker’s remarks? Contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter or on Instagram to talk all things Star Wars and horror!