Aside from Halloween‘s wonderful handling of Jamie Lee Curtis and her on-screen badass Laurie Strode, how many female movie heroes can you name above the age of 40? Not many, we imagine.
That was the question posed by über-producer James Cameron, who is all set to return to a franchise he helped create in this year’s Terminator: Dark Fate. He won’t do so alone, of course, given he’s brought Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton back to the party.
Hamilton has naturally stolen headlines left, right and center since her big comeback, given Dark Fate marks her first appearance in a Terminator movie – save for that uncredited voice role in Salvation – in 27 years. And based on the sequel’s explosive trailer, time has not been kind to the franchise’s post-Skynet world, leaving the remnants of humanity longing for a hero – a leader – to steer them in the right direction.
Enter Sarah Connor, who Cameron describes as a “bad grandma with a shotgun.” How’s that for an elevator pitch?
Sure, there are lots of female empowerment characters — you’ve got Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman and Black Widow. There’s quite a list. How many of them are over 40? Not too many. Gets to be a very short list. Talking about action empowered, action females. There are all these dewy young things. How many of them are over 60? Big fat zero. And now you start looking back through history and how many female action hero prototypical characters that were over 60. Lots of guys. Lots of midlife crisis guys — you know, Bruce Willis, Liam Neeson, Clint Eastwood, they’re still packing guns into their 80s. How many ladies? Not too many. So I thought, ‘This is worth doing, this is a great thing to do.’
Cameron’s comments come to us by way of CinemaBlend, where the producer and all-around franchise mainstay went on to wax lyrical about Greek mythology, and how it supposes three types of female heroes: the virgin, the mother, and the grandmother. Well, Sarah Connor very much falls into the latter category, albeit with a twist…
This is a powerful archetypal figure. You put that together with a known great kickass action hero I think you’ve got something special and something you haven’t seen before. … She’s bad grandma with a shotgun, and you’d better watch your ass.
Welcome to the day after Judgment Day… Terminator: Dark Fate is expected to boot online November 1st, at which point we’ll know more about Tim Miller’s grand masterplan for this legendary sci-fi franchise. The first wave of promos have confirmed Dark Fate to be a direct sequel to T2: Judgment Day, so expect to find a battle-worn Sarah Connor scouring the wasteland come November.