James Cameron is planning to revive the Terminator franchise with a cast of fresh faces.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about the future of the sci-fi series, the director, 71, revealed that leading man Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be back for another sequel.
‘I can safely say he won’t be,’ Cameron confessed to the outlet.
‘It’s time for a new generation of characters. I insisted Arnold had to be involved in Terminator: Dark Fate, and it was a great finish to him playing the T-800,’ he continued.
‘There needs to be a broader interpretation of Terminator and the idea of a time war and super intelligence. I want to do new stuff that people aren’t imagining.’
Director James Cameron has confirmed that Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured) will not be back for future Terminator films
Schwarzenegger has appeared in every Terminator film thus far, with the exception of 2009’s Terminator Salvation, which starred Christian Bale and Sam Worthington.
Despite skipping Salvation, his likeness was still included as a CGI cameo in the film.
Earlier this year, Arnie told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live that Salvation was his least favorite in the franchise because he wasn’t in it.
‘How do you do a Terminator movie without me being in the Terminator movie? It doesn’t make any sense,’ he told Cohen.
Meanwhile, Cameron has said that he’s excited to start work on the seventh Terminator film once promo winds down for Avatar: Fire and Ash.
‘Once the dust clears on Avatar in a couple of months, I’m going to really plunge into that,’ he said.
‘There are a lot of narrative problems to solve. The biggest is how do I stay enough ahead of what’s really happening to make it science fiction?’
The last Terminator film to be released was 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate.
Schwarzenegger is pictured in the original 1984 film, The Terminator
Arnie, now 78, is pictured with Linda Hamilton in 2019 after the pair returned for the last film in the franchise, Terminator: Dark Fate
Despite starring original Terminator stars Linda Hamilton and Schwarzenegger, the film was a colossal box office flop.
Dark Fate – a direct sequel to 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day – lost more than $120million at the box office.
Cameron, who wrote and produced the film with director Tim Miller, later blamed its failure on the ages of Hamilton and Schwarzenegger, who were in their 60s and 70s at the time of filming.
‘I think the problem, and I’m going to wear this one, is that I refused to do it without Arnold,’ he explained to Deadline in 2022.
‘Tim didn’t want Arnold, but I said, “Look, I don’t want that. Arnold and I have been friends for 40 years, and I could hear it, and it would go like this: “Jim, I can’t believe you’re making a Terminator movie without me.”
‘It just didn’t mean that much to me to do it, but I said, “If you guys could see your way clear to bringing Arnold back and then, you know, I’d be happy to be involved”,’ he continued.
‘And then Tim wanted Linda. I think what happened is I think the movie could have survived having Linda in it, I think it could have survived having Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she’s 60-something, he’s 70-something, all of a sudden it wasn’t your Terminator movie, it wasn’t even your dad’s Terminator movie, it was your granddad’s Terminator movie. And we didn’t see that.’
