Following Terminator Genisys' disappointing critical and commercial performance in 2015, plans to continue this iteration of the series were scrapped. Now to get the Terminator franchise back on its feet, the man responsible for its creation, James Cameron, will be working with Deadpool's Tim Miller on a new movie. Along with Arnold Schwarzenegger coming back, this new Terminator entry will see Linda Hamilton reprising Sarah Connor nearly 30 years after Terminator 2: Judgement Day's release. According to Cameron, he lured Hamilton back into this science fiction world by saying that the new movie will remind the public what a badass action heroine Sarah is. Cameron recalled:
Linda and I have a great relationship. We've stayed friends through the thick and thin of it all. And she is the mother of my eldest daughter. [They were married from 1997 to 1999.] So I called her up, and I said: 'Look, we could rest on our laurels. It's ours to lose, in a sense. We created this thing several decades ago. But, here's what can be really cool. You can come back and show everybody how it's done.' Because in my mind, it hasn't been done a whole lot since the way she did it back in '91.
Aside from recording a vocal cameo for 2009's Terminator Salvation, Linda Hamilton hasn't been involved with the Terminator franchise since Terminator 2, James Cameron's second and final directorial outing with the franchise. While the idea of traveling back to this world of killer machines and apocalyptic futures may have sounded weird to the actress at first, clearly Cameron's persuasion wiped those possible doubts away. Her return is remarkably similar to how Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford appeared in Star Wars: The Force Awakens more than three decades after Return of the Jedi. Tim Miller, who is directing the new Terminator movie, also told THR that he believes Sarah Connor appearing as a seasoned warrior in this story will make a "huge fucking statement."
Rather than follow the events of Terminator Genisys, the new Terminator movie will be a direct sequel to The Terminator and Terminator 2. So even though Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines revealed that Sarah died of cancer in 1997 (after the original Judgement Day had passed without any problems), that's now being ignored in favor of an alive and well Sarah jumping back into action for this new tale. No specific plot details for the next installment have been released yet, although in addition to Arnold Schwarzenegger potentially playing an older T-800 model (like he did in Genisys), James Cameron has expressed interest in having the actor play the man who inspired the look of those particular cyborgs agents.
The new Terminator movie will be released in theaters on July 26, 2019.
