Update: September 27, 2017
New TERMINATOR Movie Will Ignore Everything After T2; Release Date Set for July 2019
Skydance's David Ellison, along with distributor Paramount (Fox has international rights), has persuaded James Cameron to shepherd a new
Terminator for the era of Amazon drones, Facebook news bots and artificial intelligence-fueled anxiety.
Calling it "a return to form that I believe fans of the franchise have been wanting since
Terminator 2: Judgment Day," Ellison, 34, has for the past year worked secretly with Cameron and
Deadpool's Tim Miller, who will direct the untitled sequel for a July 26, 2019, release.
They assembled a writers room with scribes David Goyer, Charles Eglee, Josh Friedman and Justin Rhodes as well as Ellison, a lifelong
Terminator fan (Cameron himself shows up once a week), and have crafted what they want to be a trilogy with Schwarzenegger, 70, and original star Linda Hamilton, 61, passing the torch to a young female lead.
The team hopes it's launching the equivalent of the new
Star Wars trilogy — but with the most successful filmmaker of all time pulling the strings. To unveil their plans and explain why the
Terminator franchise is still relevant amid 21st century fears, Cameron, 63, and Miller, 47, joined
The Hollywood Reporter's editorial director Matthew Belloni for a discussion Sept. 19 on the Paramount lot in Hollywood.
"This is a continuation of the story from
Terminator 1 and
Terminator 2," Cameron said. "And we're pretending the other films were a bad dream. Or an alternate timeline, which is permissible in our multi-verse. This was really driven more by [Tim] than anybody, surprisingly, because I came in pretty agnostic about where we took it. The only thing I insisted on was that we somehow revamp it and reinvent it for the 21st century."
"It took me a week just to get up the nerve," Cameron said on asking Linda Hamilton to come back. "No, that's not true. Linda and I have a great relationship. We've stayed friends through the thick and thin of it all. And she is the mother of my eldest daughter. [They were married from 1997 to 1999.] So I called her up, and I said: 'Look, we could rest on our laurels. It's ours to lose, in a sense. We created this thing several decades ago. But, here's what can be really cool. You can come back and show everybody how it's done.' Because in my mind, it hasn't been done a whole lot since the way she did it back in '91. There are certainly plenty of 50-, 60-, 70-something guys out there that just keep cranking along doing action movies and killing bad guys left and right. But there isn't an example of that for women, and I think there should be."
"A lot of this is handing off the baton to a new generation of characters," Cameron on introducing new stars for the upcoming
Terminator movie. "We're starting a search for an 18-something young woman to essentially be the new centerpiece of these stories. And then a number of other characters around her and characters from the future. We still fold time in the story in intriguing ways. But we have Arnold's character and Linda's character to anchor it. Somewhere across there, and I won't say where, the baton gets passed, so to speak."
James Cameron Sounds the Alarm on Artificial Intelligence and Unveils a 'Terminator' for the 21st Century