Margot Robbie’s New Film ‘Terminal’ Was Fast-Tracked Because of #MeToo

Kim Taylor-Foster
Movies
Movies

Margot Robbie has only gone and set up a production company. Established in 2014, she and her partners have been developing a number of projects since its incorporation. But her first film under the LuckyChap Entertainment banner is now seeing the light of day.

It’s a feature called Terminal, starring Robbie in the lead role opposite a supporting cast that includes Mike Myers, Simon Pegg and Max Irons. The tagline ‘Revenge never looked so good’ refers to the vengeance her character, Annie, seeks; the reason for which isn’t revealed until the end. But it’s safe to say that she uses all the powers in her considerable arsenal, drawing on female stereotypes to lure the male characters into her web before finally executing her plan. Hugely timely in the wake of #MeToo and Time’s Up, Robbie says that although it wasn’t directly influenced by the movement, #MeToo was instrumental in making this her first LuckyChap release.

“We actually shot this two and a half years ago and [director] Vaughn [Stein] wrote the script… I don’t even know how many years ago,” she said. “But it’s interesting to see how so many projects became either far more relevant or far less relevant since the #MeToo movement. We really had to reassess our slate of films in development and be, like, ‘Suddenly that doesn’t feel important or relevant and suddenly this one does. Let’s put it to the top of our work pile’.”

Female-Driven Stories

Terminal-Margot-Robbie
Margot Robbie is Annie, a woman out for revenge in Terminal.

Written and directed by Stein, the film is a woman’s revenge story told by a man – so does a male writer/director in this instance help the #MeToo cause?

“We weren’t really discussing it at the time,” said Robbie. “I mean, Vaughn is a friend of ours — we had his script. I found it on our kitchen bench, actually, and the guys had been reading it — my roommates. We had been talking about starting a production company together and we were like, ‘Let’s see if we can make it, let’s see if we can do it’. So, because it was our first project, it really wasn’t about branding the company, even though we inherently gravitate towards female-driven content. It wasn’t about ‘Okay, we have to brand the company in this way and we have to do it for this reason.’ It really came down to the material and wanting our friend to get a chance to live out his dream and his vision, which we so believed in.”

A Solid Direction

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Margot Robbie as Annie in Terminal.

Since then, Robbie has discussed with her partners the direction they want to head in with regard to the kinds of projects they make.

“It was a great experience and we learnt so much. It was the first thing any of us had produced before. And we’d spent a lot of time on film sets — and no film set is in and out but it’s very, very different being there for development, pre-production and post-production as opposed to just the production part. We learnt so much and we loved it and we had a great time. That kind of kicked us off, “Okay, now we’re going to bring the company… actually get the domain names and set it up properly and really assess what we want to do and what we want to say and how we’re going to say it’.”

With a Wall Street drama called Shattered Glass, focusing on three women and described as House of Cards meets Revenge, already snapped up NBC and comedy Dollface starring Kat Dennings sold to Hulu, you can expect common themes to surface in Robbie’s projects. Which is potentially great news for women, as well as diversity in storytelling, in our post-MeToo times.

Terminal is available on DVD, Blu-ray, Digital & On-Demand from August 6.

Kim Taylor-Foster
Kim Taylor-Foster is Entertainment Editor for Fandom in the UK. She was raised on an unsteady diet of video nasties and violent action flicks.