James Cameron Won’t Confirm ‘Terminator’ Sequels, Schwarzenegger Involvement

Lawrence Yee
Movies
Movies

James Cameron — the creator of the Terminator franchise and director of the first two films, has downplayed rumors of Terminator sequels and the involvement of star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“If we’re going to do more Terminator movies — and that’s still an ‘if’ and not a ‘when’ — they have to be relevant to 2019, 2020,” Cameron told FANDOM exclusively this week.

The 2019 date is notable; that’s the year Cameron regains the rights to the franchise — which has spawned five feature films, the last being 2015’s Terminator Genisys (where Schwarzenegger reprised his role as the titular cyborg).

Gensisys took into account Schwarzenegger’s real age (the action star was 68 years old when the film was released); in the film, he played a Terminator whose organic parts had aged over the course of three decades. In 2019, Schwarzenegger will be 72.

Cameron discussed whether Schwarzenegger would have any involvement in potential projects, whether creatively or an on-camera role.

“Arnold is not creative in a sense that he’s going to sit around in a room and talk about his character. He doesn’t work that way,” Cameron explained to FANDOM. “You give him a script. If he likes it, he wants to do it. It’s pretty simple. His life is evolving where he doesn’t need this sort of thing.”

“I think if he were to comes back, it would be because he wants to,” Cameron added. “And because we would want to honor the character and hand the baton to new characters.”

Last week, Schwarzenegger said that there would definitely be another Terminator film and he would star. “In March next year, I am shooting ‘Terminator 6,’ James Cameron and [producer] David Ellison are back on board,” the action star told The Playlist.

Schwarzenegger may have let the cat out of the bag, but Cameron explicitly told FANDOM nothing is confirmed.

He even repeated that to The Arnold Fans (a site for Schwarzenegger fans) as well, but he did speculate what role an older Schwarzenegger could play:

“You got to ask yourself, ‘Why did they make these characters look and sound like Arnold?’ There has to be a reason. So yeah, it has flashed through my mind that there has to have been a prototype. There has to have been a guy who’s DNA was harvested from — that they grew the organic outer layer that they grew the Terminator from…and that presumably was a real person at some point. Now, the question is, did that person have some sort of meaning to Skynet on WHY they chose that one (Arnold)? Or was it like a whole rack of Terminators and the one that happened to be the Arnold model just happened to be closest to the door going out to the time displacement center and all the others looked different? I’ve asked myself these questions but it’s never been resolved…so stay tuned! We’re talking pretty seriously now about doing some new Terminator films or possibly a trilogy and you’ll just have to see what surfaces in those.”

So serious talks are happening nothing is confirmed… at least for now. Fans can hear it from Cameron’s mouth directly.

Even if Cameron does take a writer or producer role in future Terminator films (rumors have Deadpool’s Tim Miller taking over as director), he’s still going to busy with a little franchise called Avatar.

One Terminator sequel that is definitely coming is the 3D release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. T2 returns to theaters in the U.S. on August 25, and in the U.K. on August 29.

Lawrence Yee
Lawrence is Editor in Chief of FANDOM. He grew up loving X-Men, Transformers, and Japanese-style role playing games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. First-person shooters make him incredibly nauseous.