It doesn’t matter how many times the Terminator franchise gets melted down a vat of lava, it will always be back. Even after the latest failed swing at reviving it, Terminator: Dark Fate, rights-holders Skydance Media are ready to give it another go…except this time they’ve found a way to do it without having to pay Arnold Schwarzenegger a bunch of money. Terminator is becoming the latest brand to be turned into a Netflix anime series, because that seems to be one of their things now, too.
Deadline reports Skydance Media and Netflix are teaming up for an anime series set in the Terminator universe. The intriguing part is that it will have The Batman writer Mattson Tomlin as exec-producer and showrunner. Tomlin is also the guy who wrote Project Power, and the excellent drama Little Fish. The guy has skills.
The series will be developed with Japanese animators Production I.G., the folks behind Ghost in the Shell, among many other things.
“Anyone who knows my writing knows I believe in taking big swings and going for the heart,” Tomlin said in a statement. “I’m honored that Netflix and Skydance have given me the opportunity to approach Terminator in a way that breaks conventions, subverts expectations, and has real guts.”
To be fair, everybody comes in expecting to do really groundbreaking shit with the Terminator franchise, and it almost never works. At this point, with two great movies and a bunch of decent-to-terrible ones, not to mention a bad live-action TV series, nothing about Terminator makes a lot of sense and even its fans have mostly written it off. Perhaps going the animated route is a way to freshen it up for a new audience who don’t know or care that much about all of the contradictions and just want to see humans fighting cool-looking robots.
