James Cameron reveals he’s ‘in discussion’ to reboot Terminator franchise

Another Terminator reboot is reportedly “in discussion” right now, according to James Cameron, but nothing is finalized just yet.

In a new interview on the Smartless podcast (via ThePlaylist) about artificial intelligence in movies. The Hollywood heavyweight casually mentioned that there are some active discussions about relaunching the Terminator franchise, but that nothing is set in stone at this time. Based on the interview:

“Well, the Avatar films are about the environment; I’m not dealing with AI. If I were to do another Terminator film and maybe try and to launch that franchise again, which is in discussion, but nothing has been decided, I would make it much more about the AI side of it than bad robots gone crazy.”

Recently in a separate interview with Deadline, Cameron touched on what went wrong with Terminator: Dark Fate as well. The director attributed the failure of the sequel to his insistence on involving Arnold Schwarzenegger. He believes that either Arnold Schwarzenegger or Linda Hamilton would have been adequate, but that having both aging stars in the same movie, as Cameron theorized, made the movie feel dated.

“I think what happened is I think the movie could have survived having Linda in it, I think it could have survived having Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she’s 60 something, he’s 70 something, all of a sudden it wasn’t your Terminator movie, it wasn’t even your dad’s Terminator movie, it was your granddad’s Terminator movie. And we didn’t see that. We loved it, we thought it was cool, you know, that we were making this sort of direct sequel to a movie that came out in 1991.”

The first two “Terminator” movies were directed and co-written by Cameron, and the 1991 sequel “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” is frequently cited as one of the best action movies ever made. The three subsequent sequels, all of which received negative reviews from critics, were not a part of his work. Although “Dark Fate” failed miserably at the box office, it did get some favorable reviews.