Somewhere in between all those years he’s dedicated to making Avatar: The Way of Water and its subsequent three follow-ups currently slated for theatrical release, powerhouse director James Cameron has apparently been flirting with the idea of a Terminator reboot.
“If I were to do another Terminator film and maybe try to launch that franchise again, which is in discussion but nothing’s been decided,” James Cameron revealed on the Smartless podcast hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett.
“I would make it much more about the AI side of it than bad robots gone crazy.”
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While Cameron hasn’t directed a franchise instalment since the masterfully executed sequel Terminator 2: Judgement Day, he has returned on the odd occasion in a storyboarding and producing capacity, namely for the most recent entry Terminator: Dark Fate, which rewelcomed Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the T-800 / Carl; and was something of an attempt to refresh the existing mythology.
“We spent several weeks breaking story and figuring out what type of story we wanted to tell so we would have something to pitch Linda,” James Cameron told Deadline back in 2019.
“We rolled up our sleeves and started to break out the story and when we got a handle on something we looked at it as a three-film arc, so there is a greater story there to be told. If we get fortunate enough to make some money with Dark Fate we know exactly where we can go with the subsequent films.”
Sadly, despite garnering more favourable critical reception than any of the other three Terminator films post-Judgement Day – Rise of the Machines, Salvation, Genisys – it failed to recapture the imagination of global audiences and eventually shaped up to be a box office flop: generating a meagre US$261.1 million in receipts against a budget of US$196 million (note that Hollywood films are required to double their production costs in revenue to break even).
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The silver lining is that both the studios and, more important, James Cameron himself are interested in a Terminator reboot. All they have to do now is figure out how to bring the rest of us on that same level.
In related news, while Avatar: The Way of Water continues to fall a little short of the initial box office projections – it reportedly needs to be the “third or fourth” highest-grossing movie in history just to break even, according to Cameron himself, meaning somewhere in the airspace of US$2 billion – it’s definitively proven to be a stunning visual triumph worth the 13-year wait (read our review here).
At the time of this writing, the long-awaited return to Pandora has generated US$496.9 million against a conservative estimated production budget of US$460 million.
