James Cameron’s future for the Terminator franchise: Say goodbye to Schwarzenegger’s T-800 and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor

James Cameron, creator of the ‘Terminator’ saga and director of the first two installments, has shaken the foundations of the franchise with a recent statement. The filmmaker wants to eliminate the iconography of the last forty years of the same. He hasn’t mentioned it directly, but this includes doing away with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s appearance as the Terminator T-800 and Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor. Instead, Cameron wants to continue the saga with new actors and characters, but with familiar stories.

James Cameron says goodbye to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 Terminator Model 101 and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor

In an interview with Empire, James Cameron has revealed key facts about the future of the Terminator saga, which turns 40 in October 2024. In general, he wants to do without the appearance of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sarah Connor as the savior of humanity as the mother of John Connor, the leader of the human resistance in the future dominated by machines.

Cameron put it this way: “This is the moment when you jettison everything that is specific to the last 40 years of Terminator, but you live by those principles. You get too inside it, and then you lose a new audience because the new audience care much less about that stuff than you think they do. That’s the danger, obviously, with Avatar as well, but I think we’ve proven that we have something for new audiences.”

The filmmaker’s reason for leaving these characters behind is that they have been used countless times throughout the saga. Instead, he prefers to focus on the basic premise of the story, but applied to entirely new characters.

“You’ve got powerless main characters, essentially, fighting for their lives, who get no support from existing power structures, and have to circumvent them but somehow maintain a moral compass. And then you throw AI into the mix. Those principles are sound principles for storytelling today, right? So I have no doubt that subsequent ‘Terminator’ films will not only be possible, but they’ll kick ass. But this is the moment where you jettison all the specific iconography,” he said.

Although the filmmaker did not express it as such, another reason for dropping them could be the age of these actors: Schwarzenegger was born in 1947 and Hamilton in 1956. Their respective ages make them less and less suitable for action roles, and in the case of Schwarzenegger, let’s not forget that his appearance could be just “another” one of those used by Skynet for its Terminators, killer robots designed to infiltrate among humans and with living tissue covering their endoskeletons.