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By now you’ve probably heard that James Cameron is returning to the Terminator franchise for yet another installment of this moribund film series. If you’re wondering how that happened after Terminator Genisys was both terrible and a financial disappointment the answer is the rest of the world. While the film only made back half its budget in the US it took in 350 million dollars overseas, largely from China, so more Terminator films were pretty much locked in. However, it’s come up now that this new film, which is being pitched as a reunion flick for Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, and James Cameron, won’t have anything to do with Terminator Genisys.
That’s because even though ticket sales are important they aren’t the ultimate qualifier of the franchise age- that would be audience interest. The way online engagement in fictional universe translates into coverage and speculation as a kind of free publicity and hype is what now drives the box office world, that’s why Marvel is still king, and Genisys did not manage to win anyone’s hearts or minds. So, with the slate wiped clean and the franchise beginning again for its third attempt at a new trilogy what can we expect from the new Terminator?
So the first thing to note is that this is the absolute perfect time for a Terminator reunion flick. There are a bunch of trends sweeping through cinema right now that this movie could and probably will ride to big money. The first is the return of R-rated action flicks as viable blockbusters. We’ve had a ton of movies lately focusing on first quarter release dates, low budget, and hard R action that have absolutely cleaned up.
The John Wick films helped popularize this formula and could easily stand as the outline for a Terminator flick themselves with how completely unstoppable their lead is. Deadpool is easily the highest grossing of this particular vein and easily cemented that the slicker style but it’s the other mutant movie I think will have the biggest impact on shaping the new Terminator: Logan.
We haven’t really felt it yet but I absolutely believe Logan is going to become one of the core, Rosetta Stone type movies for understanding the direction of pop culture going into the 2020s. It’s perfectly situated at the end of the decade with just enough obvious elements for people to crib from without grasping the subtleties.
It’ll probably end up spawning a ton of imitators that take-up the slack from the now-defunct Taken/Expendables “old guy action” movie set-up, only now the aging white guys will be playing an older version of a famous character. However, I actually think trying to make "Logan but with the Terminator" could be a great idea.
The first thing to lay down here is that Terminator’s very inception was kind of cribbing from the X-Men. Days of Future Past has always been the wellspring that Terminator draws from so going back to the mutants to find the way forward just makes sense. However, more than that, there really is a parallel between Logan and Terminator in that the real enemy in both films is time.
I’m not talking about T2: Judgment Day here, which had a much kinder attitude toward the subject, but in Terminator 1 the T-800 might be the monster but the inevitability of time is the real greatest threat, the idea that the future can’t be changed- that’s why the final scene of the oncoming storm is so deeply unsettling. That same cruel, relentlessness of time is a fundamental aspect of Logan and is a rock solid foundation for how to make this franchise relevant again.
On the Connor side of the equation, everyone was always going to be excited to see Linda Hamilton again but now is an especially good time to have her return to the franchise thanks to Wonder Woman. I know that Cameron publicly embarrassed himself with his thoughts on how Wonder Woman wasn’t feminist enough for him but there’s no denying it’s made “aging white woman does action” into a way more popular trend overnight. Seriously, the Amazons coupled with Atomic Blonde are going to inspire a ton of action flicks with every even remotely Lucy Lawless type out there.
So, it’s basically the best possible time for hard R action movies and aging action stars returning to nostalgia pieces that have “the cruelty of time” very much on their mind, but it isn’t all peaches and cream. James Cameron hasn’t made a genuinely great movie since Titanic and his decaying public persona is getting pretty tiresome. What’s more, we’ve been retelling and rehashing aspects of the Terminator story for ten years now and it’s only gotten less and less endearing.
They even tried to boil down the most popular aspects of the franchise into one film with Genisys and it was terrible. Finally, the two good Terminator movies came out at a time when technophobia actually made sense but now people view their machines as an extension of themselves. How do you make robots and computers scary in an age of smartphones and social media?
Well, if I may go back to the X-Men for a moment, they actually have a character that pretty much IS a Terminator: Cable. We’ll all probably know Cable a lot better after Deadpool 2 comes out but for now, he’s a Cyborg time travel from a dark future. In 2009 Cable got a new ongoing series where he was caring for a young girl named Hope, a mutant messiah, while fleeing through time from a similar Cyborg time travel named Bishop.
The idea was that Bishop kept engineering apocalypses throughout the time stream to keep Cable and Hope from finding any safety under the logic that once he killed Hope all those alterations wouldn’t matter. It was a really out there and honestly pretty creepy idea that would absolutely fit the Terminator aesthetic. It’s got that cat and mouse style set-up that made the first two films so great but embracing the time travel in a way that’s both unique and conducive to expanding the universe beyond Skynet.
Whatever they come up with for the next Terminator film I am at least somewhat hopeful. I don’t think Terminator can necessarily THRIVE in the modern age, the decade’s worth of tarnish and rigidity of the material make it a hard fit for the age of expanded universes, but I would like to see it at least survive. I admit, the announced desire for this to set-up a new trilogy is pretty discouraging as that’s a great way to tempt the fates to ruin your movie and, moreover, not everything needs to be a multi-film epic.
The actual ‘80s legasequels that worked like Fury Road or Creed weren’t trying to set-up a new series or even build material for online speculation and hype, they were just trying to find common ground between the things we used to love and the world we live in now, they moved forward. I’d love to see the Terminator franchise make a comeback but with the reunion vibe and trilogy plans, it’s hard to lose the feeling we aren’t just going to be running in place for one last film before time really does run out on this franchise.
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