Yep, he’s back. After announcing he was looking for new projects following his tenure as Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to return to The Terminator franchise in a new film. Long rumored to be attached to a new Terminator film, Justin Lin (Fast Five) is indeed directing. Deadline reports that the two are shopping a rights package around town in order to set the new flick up at a studio.
Schwarzenegger has been attached to a number of projects in the past few months, and it was looking like was close to choosing Kim Ji-Woon’s The Last Stand as his comeback project. There’s no word on how soon the new Terminator film would go into production, but one would assume the studio that grabs the project will want to get going as quickly as possible. Hit the jump for more.
After McG’s Terminator: Salvation reboot, the rights to the franchise were in a bit of trouble. Now it looks like the new flick will be set up with a new studio (the report states that Universal, Sony and Lionsgate are “looking hard” at the package). An interesting tidbit in the story, though, is that per copyright law, the rights toTerminator revert back to James Cameron in 2018. While it seems that Cameron really wants nothing to do with the franchise anymore, if a studio were planning on making Terminator films past that date, Cameron would have to sign off.
Nevertheless, this is about an imminentTerminator flick. Personally, I would have rather seen Schwarzenegger take on some new material rather than rehashinga character from his past. After T3: Rise of the Machines , it was pretty clear that you can only do the “robot from the other movies that isn’t really the same robot from the other movies” bit so many times before it becomes a tad tedious.
Lin is expected to be a hot commodity given the strong business that Fast Five is poised to do. The film is doing considerably well overseas and this may be his calling card to be moved up to the big leagues. I’m not a huge fan of the Fast and the Furious franchise, but I can appreciate the guy’s penchant for practical stuntwork, and it looks like he knows how to film action. Not to mention, he directed the “Modern Warfare” episode of Community, which is almost enough to forgive him for pretty much anything he does in the future.
The rights package for the new Terminator should be picked up quickly by a studio, after which a screenwriter will be hired and you can bet the flick will be fast-tracked. Here’s hoping they find an original angle with which to bring Schwarzenegger back into the loop.