Arnold Schwarzenegger may have played the Terminator five times over a span of 35 years, but outside of his career-defining role, the action icon doesn’t generally tend to make a lot of sequels. In fact, if you discount his recurring cameo appearances in The Expendables, then the actor hasn’t done a direct follow-up to any of his other movies since 1984’s Conan the Destroyer.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped people from making them without his involvement, with sequels to Predator, Kindergarten Cop, Jingle All the Way and Escape Plan arriving over the last two decades, while continuations of Total Recall, Twins and True Lies were all in the works at various points before eventually coming to nothing.
Schwarzenegger had been offered a role in Predator 2, Predators and The Predator, but turned each one of them them down, even though fans would have loved to have seen an older and more grizzled Dutch stomp back onto the scene chewing a cigar and getting reacquainted with his extraterrestrial archenemies. And while the franchise is on hiatus now after Shane Black’s R-rated hybrid of sequel and reboot bombed at the box office, history has shown that no recognizable property is ever out of the picture for too long.
On that note, insider Daniel Richtman is claiming this week that not only are Disney in the early stages of developing yet another relaunch through the newly rebranded 20th Century Studios, but they want to succeed where every other Predator movie since John McTiernan’s classic original has failed and convince Schwarzenegger to make a comeback.
The 73 year-old may have helped run the Terminator into the ground, but the rest of his most famous characters remain largely untouched, and while he’s already knocked back Predator three times, Richtman claims that he’s interested in returning now. There’s no word yet on what form this new project may take, but if Schwarzenegger does indeed sign on, then it’ll no doubt generate a huge amount of interest from the fanbase.
