A few days ago, several outlets reported that the first AI models had passed the Turing test. The research hasn’t been peer reviewed yet, so while we’re all still waiting to see if James Cameron’s fictional world of The Terminator is going to become a reality or not, I figured now was as good a time as any to talk about rebooting the 40 year old franchise.
Throwing the Endoskeleton Out with the Bathwater
Right before Terminator Dark Fate shit the bed I mean was released to universal critical acclaim, I wrote an article detailing how to move the Terminator franchise forward. To put it as succinctly as possible, I argued for moving past the Connor storyline and introducing new characters.
I must be some kind of genius, because about 6 months ago James Cameron announced to Empire Magazine that he was planning to do just that. Setting aside my doubts about the intentions behind that announcement, my curiosity was piqued. Unfortunately, Cameron also said he was planning to “jettison all of the specific iconography”.
I could be wrong here, but I took that to mean that Cameron is planning to completely wipe the slate clean. Meaning a complete reboot with a totally new universe and a completely refreshed aesthetic, keeping only the story framework of humans struggling against the overwhelming odds of AI-driven machines.
And that’s not quite what I argued for back in 2019.
I like that Cameron is thinking out of the box, but, to me, a complete reboot is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You don’t reboot the Alien franchise by abandoning HR Giger’s design for the Xenomorph. You’re never gonna top that, so why even tinker with that aspect of it? And you don’t have to completely throw out the Skywalker story and all of Ralph McQuarrie’s designs to refresh Star Wars. You don’t erase Syd Mead’s vision of the world of Blade Runner simply to tell more stories in that universe. These are huge worlds. Just go play in them. That’s why they call them sandboxes.
These are huge worlds. Just go play in them. That’s why they call them sandboxes.
Besides, without the visual design of the original T-800, there’d be no Terminator franchise.
Check out our canon article for The Terminator for more about how the original The Terminator was conceived.
WWJD
(Since James Cameron has already weighed in on this, I have to offer one caveat to this part of the article: What would young James Cameron do? Because young James Cameron already gave us a road map for this. And it’s bad ass.)
Flush with his success on the original The Terminator, James Cameron did the impossible. He made a sequel to Ridley Scott’s hugely successful Alien. And he did it without ripping off the original film. Where Scott’s movie was a taut, claustrophobic horror film, Cameron’s sequel was more of a big budget action movie. Five years later, Cameron pulled the same stunt with his own baby and gave unto the world the last great Terminator film, T2: Judgment Day. Again, Cameron moved away from the horror elements of the original film and went balls to the wall action. The result is a masterclass in genre storytelling and the resulting success of that movie is the reason the rights to Cameron’s story and characters have held market value all these years, despite repeated failures to recreate the magic of his original films.
The problem is, in attempting to retell or rehash the story of Sarah and John Connor, the ever-changing rights holders and creatives involved have missed the obvious: Instead of attempting to recreate what came before, you take a page out of Cameron’s book and go another direction with it. Change the genre, change the setting, change the characters. Tell a new story. And there’s already plenty of fertile ground to plant the seeds of a potentially profitable franchise in. Prior filmmakers and financiers have just been myopically looking in the wrong place.
Instead of attempting to recreate what came before, you take a page out of Cameron’s book and go another direction with it. Change the genre, change the setting, change the characters. Tell a new story.
The Future War
The Connor storyline is a closed circuit. Attempting to retell the story of Sarah and John Connor has not worked. Whether you can get an audience to care or not, it ultimately doesn’t matter. T2 tied that thread up perfectly and left no room or reason to go back to it. Previous attempts have just made a convoluted knot out of what was a perfect ending to a two film story.
But that doesn’t mean there are no stories left to tell in the world of the Terminator.
Not every movie has to deal with the fate of humanity.
Not every movie has to deal with the fate of humanity. In fact, though The Terminator is set against the backdrop of a potential nuclear holocaust, the plot of that movie is primarily about three characters: Sarah Connor, Kyle Reece, and the titular Terminator. It’s a chase film, and a pretty small one. I think this is overlooked a lot because of how much Cameron expanded the scope of the world in T2. But one of the many reasons the first movie worked so well, despite having far inferior effects to its sequel, is because of how well-written and relatable the characters are. If we didn’t care about Sarah and Kyle, if Arnold’s T-800 didn’t terrify us even before the skin suit comes off at the end, The Terminator would have barely made a dent in the pop culture.
So, without the main storyline, where do you go with it?
The Future War, or War Against the Machines, (as depicted in The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day) is where you reboot the Terminator franchise.
The Future War, or War Against the Machines, is where you reboot the Terminator franchise.
Fans of the original films have long wanted to see more of this world, and not the desaturated, Matrix-inspired version McG gave us in Salvation. The fans are very specific on this point. It has to be James Cameron’s vision of the post-nuclear wasteland, complete with blue color grading and purple laser beams. There’s always room for interpretation, but sticking to Cameron’s sparse, desolate, but highly stylized aesthetic would win a lot of fans of the originals back. And it would be a novel change from the washed out, colorless sci-fi dystopias audiences are used to seeing.
The beauty of pursuing this line of storytelling is that there’s 30+ years of fictional post-apocalyptic hell to mine between Judgment Day when Skynet goes live and launches nukes and 2029 (4 years from now in 2025) when Kyle Reece and the original T-800 are sent back in time in The Terminator. So you keep the central conceit of Cameron’s films, that an apocalyptic war occurs between the machines and humanity, even if only in an alternate timeline. You leave the big events alone, focus on character, and tell self-contained stories that have little to no real impact on the main storyline. This opens the door for different genre storytelling, and because the scope is limited and the focus is on character, these films could be made relatively cheaply (think the Cloverfield sequels) compared to the last three sequels, all of which cost over $150 million to produce.
Keep the central conceit of Cameron’s films, that an apocalyptic war occurs between the machines and humanity, even if only in an alternate timeline. You leave the big events alone, focus on character, and tell self-contained stories that have little to no real impact on the main storyline.
Small Stories, Big World
The Berserker series is a series of books and short stories by author Fred Saberhagen that were published over the course of 40 years (beginning in 1967) about a sentient race (Berserkers) of machines built with one purpose: to destroy life where they find it. Saberhagen wrote novels about these machines, but he also wrote several short stories set in the world of the Berserkers.
Though set against the backdrop of a much larger story, with much higher stakes (the highest stakes – the annihilation of all life in the universe!), the short stories themselves set aside the grander conflict to tell the stories of individual characters in individual settings. And while the scope of those short stories were far less broad and sweeping than the main storyline, they added texture to the world of the Berserker series and made it feel as if it was populated with real people with real lives that would be impacted by the bigger events of the series. The stakes, though smaller than those of the main conflict, felt no less important and often had more weight than those of the main storyline. If the novels threatened the obliteration of all life in the universe, these self contained stories represented the stories of the individual casualties.
I think Saberhagen’s short stories could be the model for a potentially long-running and very lucrative Terminator franchise. And once you reestablish that world, the blue-hued world we all know from the first two films, you can branch out from there and experiment. In fact, going this route with the franchise would lend itself to experimentation–especially within different genres.
Genre, Genre, Genre!
The Terminator is a hybrid of genres and subgenres. It’s a chase film. It’s a horror film. It’s a sci-fi film. Terminator 2: Judgment Day is also a mashup of the action, sci-fi, and chase genres with a dash of the western thrown in for good measure. If studios want a Terminator franchise, genre is the perfect place to find it. The filmmakers just need to ask themselves better questions than How do we squeeze more money out of the Connor storyline?
The filmmakers just need to ask themselves better questions than How do we squeeze more money out of the Connor storyline?
The Western
Picture a dusty town. A town far enough from major cities to have escaped the destruction of nuclear war. A typical western setting. Though it looks deserted, the town is home to a small group of survivors. These survivors are unaware that a resistance even exists. Maybe this story is set before a resistance has even begun to take shape.
What would happen if a malfunctioning Terminator found its way to the town? The survivors have managed to stay off of Skynet’s radar, but the appearance of the Terminator threatens their fragile peace. How would this ragtag group, huddling among the aftermath of nuclear fallout, deal with such a threat? Would they stand and fight? Would they hide? Would a Clint Eastwood-like character emerge and lead them to fight for their survival?
Would they be terminated or would they survive?
The Horror Movie
Remember the end of Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead? The scene where Barbara and the local rednecks round up, torture, and destroy the zombies? What would a film that explored the capacity for human brutality, but visited upon a seemingly unsympathetic character like the Terminator, look like? What situations or conflicts would this set up? What potential tensions between characters could be used to tell a story?
The Suspense Thriller
What might happen to scientists at a research station on Antarctica? If the fallout doesn’t kill them, what would their lives look like after the machines take over? Imagine a new group of people arrive unexpectedly at the research station shortly after Skynet goes live and blows the shit out of the world. This new group brings scraps of information about what has taken place, but the whole picture is still unclear to them, and the only additional information they get is what they can glean from scraps of radio signals they intercept before even those go silent. One of the scientists dies suspiciously. Pretty soon, paranoia sets in. They begin to wonder if one of the machines they’ve heard about might be among them. Think John Carpenter’s The Thing meets the infiltrator story we see through flashback in the original The Terminator.
Think John Carpenter’s The Thing meets the infiltrator story we see through flashback in the original The Terminator.
The War Movie
A small group of resistance fighters are on a mission to hunt down and terminate a Terminator. Flip the premise of the original film. Instead of a Terminator hunting humans, the humans are doing the hunting. How would the Terminator react? Maybe it’s wounded. Vulnerable. Terminator’s don’t feel fear, but maybe it’s aware that it can’t win a fight against a dozen humans armed with plasma rifles and grenades. How would the machine react? How might the human resistance fighters’ behavior be fodder for some potentially great drama?
Instead of a Terminator hunting humans, the humans are doing the hunting.
The Claustrophobic, Psychological Thriller
It might be a bit of a hard sell to a studio wanting to market a Terminator film, but not every movie has to involve a Terminator as the direct antagonist.
What would happen to astronauts on an orbiting space station after Skynet goes live and takes over? Would the systems of the space station be intact or would they be under Skynet’s control? Faced with the reality of what has happened on earth, what sort of drama does this potentially set up for the crew members? Would they try to get home? Commit suicide? Find some other way to survive? Think Gravity set in the Terminator universe.
The Terminator Cinematic Universe
But why stop with movies? Every studio wants its own shared universe.
But why stop with movies? Every studio wants its own shared universe. Streaming TV series are where most of the good writing is nowadays, so why not create a tie-in series for HBO or HBO MAX or Max. That war movie idea I outlined above where the resistance fighters are hunting a damaged Terminator could easily be a series. Follow one squad of resistance fighters around on different missions. Put them in different situations, present them with different problems they have to deal with. Show us the effects the pressure and endlessly bleak reality they live in have on them. And show us how they persevere and hold onto hope despite the overwhelming odds.
Whatever. The point is, the world of Terminator is rich with storytelling potential. There could be comics, novels, video games, table top games, toys, an animated series. And since we’re just wishing upon a star here, I’m going to throw out something crazy. When I was a teenager, Bantam books began publishing a series of anthology books set in the Star Wars universe. These were the Tales from books. Tales from the Mrs Eisley Space Cantina, Tales from Jabba’s Palace, Tales of the Bounty Hunters, Tales from the Empire. The idea behind these stories was genius. Take side characters that are often only seen in the background and flesh out its backstory.
What was the character doing before we see it in the movie? Why was it there? What happened to the character after? What’s the character’s story?
I loved this idea, and it fired my young imagination. So much so, that I’ve written a few short stories using this concept. One of them was inspired by a scene from The Terminator. But that’s a story for another time. Point is, you could do all sorts of things with this idea. Run a fan film competition with it. Publish short story anthologies. Create a What if? animated anthology series based on background characters. Produce self contained animated short films in the same vein as The Animatrix and the animated short films that were released to support the premier of Blade Runner 2049. Which brings me to my argument for doing these: all of this can be done as marketing to build excitement for the movie releases.
And the beauty is with all of this, if you keep the aperture small and focused on the granular rather than getting caught up in trying to tie everything into the big events, the possibilities for storytelling (and profit) are unlimited.
And there you go. There’s your TCU.
(Btw, if you’re reading this and you know the people who own the rights to the Terminator franchise, have their people call my people.)
No Fate but What We Make
The Terminator franchise is a mess. There’s no denying that. And although Netflix’s animated series Terminator Zero wasn’t bad, it did nothing to really rejuvenate interest in the franchise, and it basically made the same mistake the other films made by hewing too closely to the source material.
Some people have said that the best thing to do with the Terminator franchise is to terminate it. And maybe they’re right. But I think there’s still a way to make it work. Scale the budgets back. Tell smaller stories. Hint at the larger one. Introduce us to new characters that are relatable. Characters we invest in. That make us care about whether they live or die. Keep the budgets small. Minimize the risk. Vary the genres.
But there’s no need to start from scratch. The universe is good, so use it. Just stop trying to tell the same story over and over again.
Of course none of this will probably ever happen with the Terminator franchise. Besides, I doubt the sincerity of his commitment to even bother with the Terminator franchise at this point. It’s like he got remarried and the Avatar sequels are his kids from the current marriage who get all of the attention (undeservedly so), while the kids from his first marriage go without shoes and hugs.
But you never know. The future’s not set, you know.
