He said he’d be back…
According to Deadline, Arnold Schwarzenegger is attached to star in a rights package that will bring back THE TERMINATOR.
Yup, it’s no joke. After first lending his voice and likeness to a cartoon superhero named “The Governator” (yeah, no joke either…), Arnie has expressed interest in another film. While there is no screenwriter or script yet, Justin Lin, the director of FAST FIVE, has been recruited to direct.
The future of the TERMINATOR franchise has been in turmoil for a while. After the rights when to bankruptcy auction, everything was bought up by Pacificor, who wanted to make an entire new trilogy. (We all know how that ended up.)
Now, there IS a slight problem with all the rights, however, that will only allow the buyer to make TERMINATOR movies until 2018. Deadline explains it best:
“There is a stipulation in copyright law that if you assign your rights, you get them back in 25 years. In this case, Cameron assigned his rights to Hemdale, and the North American rights will revert back to him in 2018. Now, Cameron has more or less washed his hands of the Terminator franchise, but I’m told a new deal would have to be made with him if the plan was to keep making Terminator installments beyond that period. There is plenty of time to make at least two Terminator films before that happens, and that might be sufficient to end the saga that so far has spanned four films. Any financier that makes those films owns them free and clear.”
So yeah…after so many years of waiting for a movie to match up to TERMINATOR 2, we have until 2018 to get something rolling, or James Cameron will take back creative control.
Let’s see what happens, and only hope for something as cool as this: