How to save a billion dollar franchise; that’s the looming question attached to Entertainment Weekly’s coverage of Terminator Genisys, with Alan Taylor’s ambitious reboot and trilogy-starter adorning the cover of this latest issue.
There are two images in total: one with core protagonists Sarah Connor and Kyle Resse (played by Emilia Clarke and Jai Courtney, respectively), with the other placing Matt Smith and Jason Clarke’s characters front and center.
And honestly, we’re not sure which we prefer. We’ve learned over the last few days that there’s a lot riding on Terminator Genisys — hell, Paramount has went all-out and already confirmed a trilogy. Still, these first stills are, how should we put this, a little underwhelming.
But we shouldn’t judge a book on its cover or, more appropriately, a film by its marketing campaign. Thankfully, Entertainment Weekly had much more information to divulge on the upcoming reboot, and even outlined Genisys’ opening sequence.
The beginning of Terminator: Genisys, the first of three planned films that Paramount hopes will relaunch the beloved sci-fi franchise, is set in 2029, when the Future War is raging and a group of human rebels has the evil artificial-intelligence system Skynet on the ropes. John Connor (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ Jason Clarke) is the leader of the resistance, and Kyle Reese (Divergent‘s Jai Courtney) is his loyal soldier, raised in the ruins of post apocalyptic California. As in the original film, Connor sends Reese back to 1984 to save Connor’s mother, Sarah (Game of Thrones‘ Emilia Clarke), from a Terminator programmed to kill her so that she won’t ever give birth to John. But what Reese finds on the other side is nothing like he expected.
Terminator Genisys is due to release on July 1st, 2015 and will look to kickstart an entire new trilogy of films depicting the resistance’s push against Skynet. Here’s hoping the first impression isn’t indicative of the final product.
