After five films in the space of 30 years, Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Terminator franchise are practically synonymous.
The latest entry, Genisys, flipped the script by having the Austrian Oak play not one, but two cybernetic organisms, with good guy Arnie raising the young Sarah Connor (Game of Thrones‘ Emilia Clarke) amid an apocalyptic wasteland. But the question remains: why do Skynet’s time-travelling death machines always take the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger?
That’s a topic that was presented to series mastermind James Cameron during a recent Q&A session hosted by The Arnold Fans (via JoBlo), in which Cameron hinted that Terminator 6 – the potential franchise reboot he’s overseeing with former Deadpool director Tim Miller – may deliver the answers fans so crave.
Yeah, you got to ask yourself, ‘Why did they make these characters look and sound like Arnold? There has to be a reason. So yeah, it has flashed through my mind that there has to have been a prototype. There has to have been a guy who’s DNA was harvested from – that they grew the organic outer layer that they grew the Terminator from…and that presumably was a real person at some point.
Could The Terminator “reinvention” flesh out the history behind the human model on which the T-800 was based? All we know for sure is that Arnold Schwarzenegger is back, back, back, despite reports to the contrary, so there’s no telling what James Cameron and David Ellison are rustling up this time around.
Assuming this isn’t just a ploy to ensure Schwarzenegger has a future in the series, there’s potential here for a deep dive into Skynet’s murky history, and that’s something Cameron touched on while chatting to The Arnold Fans.
Now, the question is, did that person have some sort of meaning to Skynet on WHY they chose that one? Or was it like a whole rack of Terminators and the one that happened to be the Arnold model just happened to be closest to the door going out to the time displacement center and all the others looked different? I’ve asked myself these questions but it’s never been resolved…so stay tuned! We’re talking pretty seriously now about doing some new Terminator films or possibly a trilogy and you’ll just have to see what surfaces in those.
If Schwarzenegger is to be believed, The Terminator will start shooting in the spring ahead of a potential release in 2019. And it may well herald the beginning of an all-new trilogy from Paramount and the folks at Skynet Skydance.