James Cameron Hits Roadblock With New ‘Terminator’ Script
Maybe it’s time for James Cameron to admit defeat and leave The Terminator on the scrap heap. He is working on a new installment, but he is having a case of writer’s block that most casual observers could see coming. Is the concept too tired and played out for him finally? Kind of, but that isn’t his main problem.
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In a conversation with CNN, Cameron, who has been a master of sci-fi and action his entire career, said he can’t seem to crack the genre anymore. The reason: everything is catching up to visions of the future authors and futurists had 40 years ago.
“I’ve been tasked with writing a new Terminator story,” he told them (via ComicBookMovie). “I’ve been unable to get [very far] on that… I don’t know what to say that won’t be overtaken by real events. We are living in a science fiction age right now.”
AI hasn’t taken over, but it is a more prominent part of life than anyone could ever imagine. The technology and its influence are growing by the day, so it’s easy to see what Cameron means. However, the prevalence (and possibly potential threat of AI) isn’t the only thing indicating there’s no story left to tell in the Terminator franchise.
Many fans, if not most, believe that the series worked best as a duology made up of the first two films ignoring everything that came after. It’s hard to argue against that ethos when the series fumbled each time someone tried to keep the story going. Moreover, the most recent example, Terminator: Dark Fate, didn’t benefit from Cameron’s involvement – or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s and Linda Hamilton’s for that matter.
When asked what went wrong, Cameron didn’t think the film was the problem. “Our problem was not that the film didn’t work. The problem was, people didn’t show up. I’ve owned this to Tim Miller many times. I said, ‘I torpedoed that movie before we ever wrote a word or shot a foot of film,'” he told Empire Online (via SFFGazette.com) late last year.
“We achieved our goal. We made a legit sequel to a movie where the people that were actually going to theatres at the time that movie came out are all either dead, retired, crippled, or have dementia. It was a non-starter. There was nothing in the movie for a new audience,” the filmmaker added.
Maybe that’s just it, except Cameron has things turned around. It’s not the audience; it’s the movies. Everything that can be done has conceivably been done, and not just within the confines of a Terminator movie. There’s nowhere left to go, nothing new to say, and no jumping back in time to change that.
