The Terminator saga is in desperate need of fresh blood. It’s been years — maybe even decades — since the franchise felt fresh, no matter who’s working to progress the story. Each sequel seems to recycle the same premise as the original Terminator or its sequel, T2, ignoring a world ripe with dystopian potential.
That may finally begin to change with Terminator Zero, Netflix’s upcoming animated reboot. With the help of a fresh medium and an all-new batch of characters, Zero could be just the thing the franchise needs to stay relevant. But how does the architect of the franchise, James Cameron, feel about an animated riff on his original ideas?
“It looks interesting,” he recently said of Terminator Zero. “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. What’s their takeaway? What intrigued them about it? Where are they going with it?”
Cameron noted that he’s still looking for ways to continue the saga on his own terms, but he is “curious” to see how Zero interprets (or even remixes) his take on Judgment Day, the nuclear apocalypse that kicks off the conflict between humanity and machines in earnest. It may not reinvent the wheel — or even stray too far from the blueprint that Cameron laid out in Terminator and T2 — but if Zero succeeds in telling a fresh story within the franchise, it could open the door for more creative pivots in future projects.
Cameron may not realize it either, but something like Terminator Zero is exactly what the franchise needs to succeed in this post-modern world. The sci-fi saga owes a massive debt to the director; it likely wouldn’t exist without him. Whether it can continue without him, especially 40 years on, is another question entirely — and the sequels we’ve gotten haven’t done much to give fans any confidence.
It’s not that the franchise needs Cameron’s direct involvement to keep going (though the Cameron-produced Dark Fate was actually very good). In a way, Cameron’s original pitch is the very thing holding the franchise back. Sequels and spin-offs are far too reliant on the idea of traveling from the future to the past, pitting machine against machine, or protecting a human messiah figure. It never matters where a new story falls on the Terminator timeline; the beats always follow the exact same path. The one sequel that actually explored a new chapter of the saga was The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and it did so by homaging Cameron’s past work, not ripping it off entirely.
Terminator Zero could do the same — and set a precedent for more original adventures in one fell swoop. Hopefully, it can straddle that line between reverence and innovation, otherwise, the saga will find itself at square one all over again.
