Collider was able to sit down with Terminator co-creator James Cameron about where the franchise could be going if Terminator: Dark Fate does well at the box office and they’re able to make the trilogy they had originally planned to do.
He says they hope to tackle the human relationship with artificial intelligence in the next two movies and how Judgement Day was still going to happen even if it was delayed, it would just give rise to the next John Connor (presumably with Dani Ramos).
However, says that Dark Fate could not get sequels and still be a great one-time story.
CAMERON: “I feel like one of my major motivations on this film or coming back to the, hopefully franchise, was to explore the human relationship with artificial intelligence. I don’t feel we did that in Dark Fate. I feel that we set the stage or we set the table for that exploration, and that exploration would take place in a second film and a third film. And we know exactly where we’re going to take that idea. What we wanted to get in the first movie was this idea that it’s just going to keep happening. The names will change, but the basic conflict is going to continue to take place until it gets resolved one way or the other. And so I believe we’ve set that table and if, like I said, if we get the opportunity, we know where to take the story so that it doesn’t become… I think you start simple and then you elaborate, and you can elaborate over a series of films. If they’re made by the same people with the same intentions and the same philosophy, then there can be a kind of a story arc across multiple films. But that said, I think Dark Fate stands alone as a pretty good one-time story.”
James Cameron also reveals the group of writers (Chic Eglee, Josh Friedman, David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes) have developed a three-film story arc and starts with Terminator: Dark Fate.
CAMERON: “We’ve got a lot of thinking about what things look like up in the future to draw upon, and we sort of know where our storyline is going in broad strokes because we actually had other–I don’t know if you noticed, but the story credits for the movie are a little weird because you’ve also got Chic Eglee and Josh Friedman in the story credits because we sat in the room and we broke story across three movies before we focused down onto the first of the proposed three, which is Dark Fate. So there’s really a plotline that runs all the way out through a third film, if we get to that stage. And the reason for that is you spend a couple of weeks to future-proof yourself so you don’t paint yourself into a corner and you could still do the things that you want to do. So yeah, there’s a lot of good thinking that exists already on that.”
Reviews have been mostly positive and high-end projections have the film opening at $46 million.
The box office will ultimately determine if we’ll get Terminator 7 and Terminator 8.
I think it remains to be seen if director Tim Miller will come back to finish the trilogy.
You can check out HN’s own spoiler-free review of the film below.
Terminator: Dark Fate opens next weekend on November 1st.
SOURCE: COLLIDER
