Terminator

Throughout the years, the one constant in the Terminator franchise has been Arnold Schwarzenegger. Even after director James Cameron quit the franchise, Schwarzenegger kept on chugging along, appearing in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine, Terminator Genisys, and even having his likeness pop up in Terminator Salvation while he was still the governor of California. So with the news that James Cameron would be taking the helm of the franchise again after Genisys flopped, fans have been wondering if the actor had one last showing in him as everyone’s favorite compassionate death machine.

Just when you thought the Terminator franchise was dead, along comes a mobile game developer to prove you wrong. Hitting mobile platforms today is Terminator Genisys: Future War, a new clan-based multiplayer game from Plarium Games. Why the developer wanted to hitch its wagon to the least-successful sequel in the series is beyond us, but setting Future War in the post-Skynet timeline where humans battle machines was definitely a smart choice.

Did you know that they apparently made another Terminator movie in 2015? Despite having seen it in theaters back during its original run, this still strikes me as new, hard-to-believe information. If there was really a new installment of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s popular sci-fi/action franchise as recently as two years ago, wouldn’t someone remember that? Wikipedia claims that the film (subtitled Genisys, which sounds fake but okay) attempted to launch Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke’s big-screen phase of her career, included a clutch starring role from Ahnuld himself, and earned the second-most of any entry in the series. Call me crazy, but that seems like a pretty major occurrence to have entirely fled the public‘s collective pop-cultural memory. I’m skeptical — does this look like a real movie to you?

With James Cameron caught in an endless loop of Avatar rumors and delays, it’s become fashionable for some fans to treat the director like a Hollywood has-been. I don’t get it. Even if you think the original Avatar is a hollow mess of special effects, it’s still a fun entry in Cameron’s ‘Soldiers vs. Monsters’ filmography. Are we so awash in incredible action directors that we can afford to dismiss Cameron’s eye for spectacle and clean action scenes? I think not.

James Cameron has been toying around with a Terminator 2: Judgement Day 3D release for some time-- last year he announced that he was working on it, and that it would arrive in theaters around the time of the film’s 25th anniversary. Seeing as that deadline’s come and gone, it looked like a remaster was not to be. Fortunately, according to Collider, Cameron is still working on it, as announced on the Terminator 2 official Facebook page yesterday with a cool new poster:

If you interview the star of a major franchise and you don’t ask them about the future of said franchise, then did your interview ever really happen at all? We may never know the answer to such existential journalistic questions, but thanks to a new interview, we now know how Jai Courtney feels about the possibility of making more Terminator movies. The answer: No…but maybe yes?

Terminator Genisys left audiences baffled — hardly the return to form for the franchise we’d hoped for after Terminator: Salvation (remember that movie?), and while there were some interesting / wacky ideas within, Genisys was mostly miscast and about as bland as Jai Courtney. Last we heard, the franchise’s producers assured fans that the series would continue after some “recalibrating,” but today’s update isn’t a very optimistic one for anyone who was hoping for another sequel.

Okay, so maybe he won’t be back after all.

Once upon a time, the evil computer program Skynet sent a killer cyborg called a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of the future leader of the human resistance in the war against the machines. When that failed, it sent a more advanced robot back in time to execute the young John Connor, but old John Connor sent back another robot to protect his younger self. And it only got crazier from there. Pretty soon, there were all kinds of flesh-covered robots floating around two separate timelines and it all got very confusing. Thankfully, we’re here to rank all of those time traveling robots so you don’t have to. Come with us if you want to rank fictional cyborgs.

Time travel is confusing, what with changing the future and creating diverging/alternate timelines and paradoxes, etc. It’s a lot to take in, even more so in a franchise like the Terminator films. The very first trailer for Terminator Genisys indicated that the fifth installment in the franchise would be the most confusing one yet — just when you thought you had started to figure out the other four, here comes another one to screw it all up. Thankfully, someone made a handy interactive Terminator timeline to help you keep it all straight.