James Cameron Is Making A New Terminator Movie But There’s A Scary Twist

James Cameron wants to make another Terminator movie, but first he wants to see what's going to happen with artificial intelligence in real life.

By Robert Scucci | Updated

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Games Radar has given us an inside scoop on a possible upcoming James Cameron directed reboot of the Terminator franchise, but it seems like we’re going to have to wait for further developments. These developments aren’t the usual kind that we would expect in the form of casting and budgeting, however. Cameron has shared with Dell Tech World that he has started writing a Terminator movie, but he wants to see how artificial intelligence “shakes out before going any further,” which could have frightening implications, to say the least.

Introducing AI into a James Cameron Terminator reboot opens up a whole new world of possibilities for the franchise, and we’d be lying if we said we weren’t curious and just a little bit excited about this change in direction. Cameron elaborated that he would rather make a film about the AI side of Skynet rather than more “bad robots gone crazy.” In other words, the new Terminator film will probably be set in the middle of a shadow war between humans and machines that is less hellbent on the total destruction of humanity through means of conventional warfare like we’ve seen in the past.

With AI being such a hotly debated topic these days, it makes sense that James Cameron would want to explore this territory in a Terminator film. They say that art imitates life, and considering how ubiquitous AI is starting to become in our day-to-day lives, we can’t help but wonder what would happen if this technology fell into the wrong hands. We’ve seen films in the past explore this territory (Minority Report, The Matrix), but it’s safe to say that we haven’t seen it on the epic scale that James Cameron is capable of delivering in a Terminator movie.

We’re not saying that science-fiction films of the past didn’t do an excellent job in portraying a dystopian nightmare involving AI, but in the year 2023, the technology has gotten to a point that we couldn’t have possibly imagined decades ago. As James Cameron bides his time waiting for the perfect angle to pursue in regard to how artificial intelligence would fit into a Terminator film, we know for certain that his vision will have a considerable amount of depth to it. We’re talking about the mind that gave us Avatar and Aliens after all.

James Cameron brought us the first two Terminator films: The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The latter is widely considered to be one of the greatest action movies ever made and for good reason. But there was a string of sequels in the 2000s that Cameron did not write or direct (though he produced Dark Fate) that did not fare well in comparison to his first two installments.

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Edward Furlong and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

The growth of artificially intelligent technology in modern culture could be just the catalyst we need to elaborate on what made the original Terminator films so iconic, while pushing the franchise into the future as it explores where society is at today, technologically speaking.

Good things come to those who wait, so it’s probably going to be a while before we hear from James Cameron in regard to the direction the new Terminator film will take. But it’s exciting to think that the man behind the original Terminator films will once again amaze us with the vision of disorder that brought us the T-800 in the first place.