By Filmmaker James Cameron says that “more than a plan” is in place for the future of “The Terminator” franchise a full forty years after it first graced screens.
Cameron, of course, helmed the first two films but otherwise has mostly stepped back from the series. A third film continued the story without Cameron’s involvement, and then three more films (Salvation, Genisys, Dark Fate) all played about with the continuity and none of which set the box-office alight.
As a result, Cameron says he’s confident in the franchise’s future because what comes next will require a ground-up reboot. He tells Empire:
“It’s more than a plan, that’s what we’re doing. That’s all I’ll say for right now. This is the moment when you jettison everything that is specific to the last 40 years of Terminator, but you live by those principles.
It also means moving away from the characters and lore of the prior films and going on all new tangents whilst keeping it thematically true:
You get too inside it, and then you lose a new audience because the new audience care much less about that stuff than you think they do. That’s the danger, obviously, with Avatar as well, but I think we’ve proven that we have something for new audiences.”
So what do you keep? Only the most basic elements:
“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.”
Cameron also reacted to those who cringe at the dialogue in his films saying: “I don’t cringe on any of the dialogue, but I have a lower cringe factor than, apparently, a lot of people do around the dialogue that I write. You know what? Let me see your three-out-of-the-four-highest-grossing films – then we’ll talk about dialogue effectiveness.”
He says looking back at “The Terminator” these days he does find parts of it “that are pretty cringeworthy” but that is over the production value, though he says: “we did pretty well for the resources we had available”.
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