Do people care about the Terminator franchise anymore? Three failed reboots in the space of ten years would say no after none of them made enough money to justify launching the brand new trilogy they all promised. The box office returns of most recent installment Dark Fate would also say no, as it wound up as the lowest-grossing entry since James Cameron’s low budget original 35 years previously and lost over $120 million. Even Mackenzie Davis doesn’t think so, and she signed a multi-picture deal and took third billing in said bomb.
However, much like Judgment Day, another stab at Terminator feels inevitable as the brand desperately clings on to its last remaining shreds of relevancy. Something drastic is required at this stage to stop the rot, and recent history has shown that throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at it and constantly bringing back Arnold Schwarzenegger simply doesn’t work.
Where we go from here remains to be seen, but insider Daniel Richtman is now reporting that the next Terminator project will be more of a straightforward horror than the mega budget action blockbusters that have characterized the series for almost 30 years. Obviously, Cameron’s first effort was a stripped-down and relentlessly tense thriller made on a thrifty $6.4 million budget, and the back to basics approach has worked for countless franchises in the past.
That being said, this is just the latest in a long line of Terminator reboots that Richtman has claimed are in development over the last couple of months along with a future-set movie overseen by Cameron, a PG-13 theatrical sequel and a TV show for Hulu. There’s every chance none of them will end up happening, or that a few of them are now being merged into one, but whatever the case may be, the tipster claims that the next project that the franchise brings us will fall firmly in the horror genre.
