The New Terminator Films Have Found A New Producer
This article is more than 2 years old
The road to new Terminator movies has been a bumpy one, full of traffic jams and detours. But now, nearly 18 months after Megan Ellison dropped $20 million on the rights to the sci-fi franchise, she has tapped her brother, David Ellison, as her production partner.
This is a step in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go. Justin Lin was attached to direct the fifth chapter of the humans vs. cyborgs saga, but he has since left the project to focus on Fast and/or Furious movies. Franchise star Arnold Schwarzenegger was also linked to the new films, though the state of his involvement at the present time is unclear.
Right now there is no studio on board to back the new Terminator films, and there has been no forward progress on the script in god knows how long. Regardless of how things play out, the film will be a partnership between Megan’s Annapurna Pictures and David’s Skydance Productions.
The children of billionaire Oracle-founder Larry Ellison, between them the siblings have recently left their fingerprints on films like Lawless, The Master, and Killing Them Softly for Megan; and World War Z, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and Star Trek Into Darkness for David. That’s an eclectic mix between the pair, though both served as executive producers on the Coen Brothers’ True Grit.
Though there hasn’t been much movement, the new Terminators need to get going before too awful long. Otherwise rights revert back to James Cameron in 2019. He’s got like 50 Avatar sequels in the works, so odds are he won’t be doing anything with them any time soon. Originally, the goal was to make a trilogy of new films, though that has since been pared back to two pictures. Hopefully there will be more to talk about soon.
