Ever since The Terminator hit the big screen 40 years ago, Hollywood has taken the time-twisting cyborg saga and run with it. First, James Cameron sequelised his own original with the exemplary Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Then, things got more tangled. Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines continued the story without Cameron’s involvement; Terminator Salvation was something of a reboot delving into the war against the machines; Terminator Genisys attempted to remix the iconography of the series; all landed to underwhelming responses. Most recently, Terminator: Dark Fate served as a direct sequel to Judgment Day, and stalled at the box office. But while the big-screen sequels have struggled to live up to the heights of The Terminator and T2, James Cameron is confident that there’s a future for the franchise – and knows what needs to be done to bring it roaring back to life.
“This is the moment when you jettison everything that is specific to the last 40 years of Terminator, but you live by those principles,” he tells Empire in a major new interview celebrating four decades of The Terminator. That means moving away from the iconic original cast, and telling new and different stories in the world of the A.I. apocalypse. “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,” the filmmaker explains. “That’s the danger, obviously, with Avatar as well, but I think we’ve proven that we have something for new audiences.”
Without Arnie, without Linda Hamilton, without the T-800 and the T-1000 and Sarah Connor, it might be hard to imagine what’s left. But Cameron is clear on the elements that make Terminator tick. “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?” he reasons. “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.”
And it’s not just that future Terminator films are possible – it seems Cameron, while hard at work on Avatar: Fire & Ash and its sequels, is masterminding something new in the machine-ridden future. “It’s more than a plan,” he reveals. “That’s what we’re doing. That’s all I’ll say for right now.” It’s like the Terminator always said: ‘I’ll be back’.
Read Empire’s major new James Cameron interview – talking the ongoing legacy of The Terminator and its sequels; the thematic preoccupations that have reverberated throughout his career; his changing relationship with the original film; and what the future holds for the franchise – in the November 2024 issue, on sale Thursday 26 September. Pre-order a copy online here.