Deadpool director’s Terminator sequel will ignore last three ‘bad dream’ films

The Terminator franchise is the latest barely breathing iconic Hollywood series set to be rebooted.

Tim Miller, director of 2016’s Deadpool, is working with James Cameron on a sequel of sorts to The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. David Goyer of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice fame will help write the film, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton set to return. Cameron wants to turn the “sequel” into a brand-new trilogy.

A lengthy new profile on Cameron and the Terminator franchise in The Hollywood Reporter today confirmed that the untitled movie will continue the storyline from the first two Terminator films, ignoring everything afterward — 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2009’s Terminator Salvation and 2015’s Terminator Genisys.

“We’re pretending the other films were a bad dream,” Cameron told The Hollywood Reporter. “Or an alternate timeline, which is permissible in our multi-verse. This was really driven more by [Tim] than anybody, surprisingly, because I came in pretty agnostic about where we took it. The only thing I insisted on was that we somehow revamp it and reinvent it for the 21st century.”

The 21st century angle means that the new Terminator movie will examine the modern age of tech, and the dystopian attributes that define it. Drones, artificial intelligence and a general obsession with technology will make up the recipe for Terminator’s new cautionary message. These aren’t just robots or 1980s concepts of what artificial intelligence would look like. Cameron continued:

We are co-evolving with our technology. We're merging. The technology is becoming a mirror to us as we start to build humanoid robots and as we start to seriously build AGI — general intelligence — that's our equal. Some of the top scientists in artificial intelligence say that's 10 to 30 years from now. We need to get the damn movies done before that actually happens!

Miller, who exited the Deadpool sequel earlier this year after reports broke out about creative differences between him and star Ryan Reynolds, said he had been talking to producer David Ellison before that. Miller said that before he parted ways with Deadpool 2, he knew that Terminator would be his next movie.

“I mean, I wanted to make Deadpool 2,” Miller said. “I was going to do that, until I wasn’t. So, there was that, which took up about seven months of my time.”

The Terminator “sequel” is set to be released on July 26, 2019.