Is James Cameron Really Returning to One of His Most Iconic Franchises?

James Cameron has had a hand in many of our favorite franchises. He was the one who brought back Alien with his follow-up film, Aliens, and he is responsible for both Avatar and Terminator. Could we see a return to the latter though?

During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cameron talked about the new Netflix anime series Terminator Zero and what he thought about it. “It looks interesting. My relationship to that is very much like The Sarah Connor Chronicles — other people spinning stories in a world I set in motion is interesting to me,” Cameron said.

He went on to talk about how he gets to see what someone else’s vision is in this universe. “What’s their takeaway? What intrigued them about it? Where are they going with it? It looks like they’re going back to the root cause of Judgment Day — the nuclear war — and whether that’s an ultimate timeline,” he said. “I’d be curious to see what they’ve come up with. I’m working on my own Terminator stuff right now. It’s got nothing to do with that. Like with The Sarah Connor Chronicles, they occasionally touched on things I had been playing with completely independently. So there’s some curiosity there. It’s not a burning curiosity, but, obviously, it’d be nice to see it succeed.”

Obviously, Cameron’s comment about working on his own stuff in the Terminator franchise demands more details but he remained tight-lipped about it. “It’s totally classified. I don’t want to have to send out a potentially dangerous robotic agent if you were to talk about it, even retroactively.”

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Look, I think the Terminator franchise is one of our more fascinating pieces of media and I do love when we get to see other creatives take the reins. That being said, Cameron coming back to it is exciting. He directed the first two movies in the franchise and has since gotten a story credit on Dark Fate but that’s it. This story works with Cameron behind it and while I do like seeing other takes on what Cameron created with Gale Anne Hurd, I kind of want to see what an older Cameron would do with it.

He is in the thick of it with his Avatar movies and I don’t think he’s going to stop those to make this new Terminator but it would be nice to see what he’d do with it now.