Terminator is coming back as a Netflix anime series
Netflix is the latest company to try to get the ever-optimistic Terminator franchise up and running again
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You could make a strong case that every Terminator project since, roughly, 2003, has been an attempt to fix the franchise—or at least to get it back on track, and return to the largely impossible highs of 1991 juggernaut T2: Judgment Day. Now, Netflix is getting ready to attempt to succeed where T3, Salvation, Genisys, Dark Fate, and, to a much less extent, The Sarah Connor Chronicles all faltered, announcing today that it’s bringing the series back as… an anime.
That’s right: Terminator is going the reverse-One Piece/Cowboy Bebop/Avatar: The Last Airbender route, with the streamer announcing today at its annual GEEKED Week celebration that the traditionally live-action series will now be revived via Japanese animation. Said news came complete with a teaser trailer, although, beyond delivering its text in both English and Japanese—and giving a few hits of those big, beefy Brad Fiedel drums on the soundtrack—it’s a very brief one that doesn’t give us much indication about what to expect from the show.
Among the various credits that flash by very quickly in the teaser, we do get one major one: Mattson Tomlin, who’s best known as an associate of The Batman director Matt Reeves, having contributed writing to Reeves’ take on the Dark Knight. He also directed, with Reeves as a producer, the 2021 film Mother/Android, in which Chloë Grace Moretz plays a young woman fighting to keep her baby alive in a world overrun by killer androids, which is about as good a trial run for making a Terminator show as you could probably hope to have. Animation duties, meanwhile, will apparently be handled by Production I.G., the extremely prolific Japanese studios whose output includes Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex, FLCL, and about a billion other anime hits.
No word yet (besides “soon”) on when the series will be available.
28 Comments
It’s not a good sign that they couldn’t get the classic theme and instead hired someone to make something that sounded sorta like it but legally distinct.
The first two movies had different themes.
Not really, they are variations of the same theme just with different instruments. Terminator is mostly synth while T2 is a full orchestra
Sounds to me like the T1 theme, at least at the end, has six notes(da-dun-da-dun-da-dun), whereas the T2 theme has five(da-dun-dun-da-dun).
You beat me to it you magnificent bus stop!
Why did we, as a society, let Vanilla Ice be a thing?
For that matter, how did we as a society decide that “vanilla” means “white”? Vanilla beans are black! The only reason vanilla ice cream is white is because it is generally flavored with vanilla extract, which is pretty colorless and so the ice cream looks just the cream it is made of.
Ice Ice Baby is a better song than Under Pressure.
To be clear, I’m not saying Ice, Ice Baby is good – it’s shit. Just a bit less shit, is all.
I’m going to be the hipster and say that Fiedel’s original low-fi version is superior (the first movie as well). The whole damn soundtrack, really. It’s what the yoots nowadays retroactively call “synthwave” or whatever.
Like everything with T2, everything is turned up to 11. Your mileage may vary if that makes anything better. I consider T2 one of the greatest action films ever made but the original Terminator is such a well made movie on a shoe string budget and that’s what makes it the best in the franchise. Music included. I’m a sucker for what the kids call synthwave
It’s like when they re-released Daria on DVD and had lost all the music rights, so they had to come up with almost-but-not-quite sounding music.My favourite was clear don’t-sue version of Alice In Chains’ “Rooster” during the paintball ep.Maybe this guy couldn’t find the right pans.
If you ever watch 90210(the original) or Melrose Place on streaming they have the same issue If I recall the episode of 90210 when Color Me Bad shows up and sings has the music replaced and that is just silly
A show about young terminators in the big city living, learning, falling in love . . .
They were on a break.
If one of them looks like Summer Glau, that would be understandable!
Two T-800s come to the Big Apple to find their apartment is being demolished. There’s a place they can stay and the rent is cheap. The bad news is…it’s a women only condo. Fortunately, these two T-800s are already infiltration units.
Its about the Terminators we made along the way …
I’m surprised it hasn’t been done already. And setting it in the post-Judgment Day future is basically the only way to do it that won’t feel like it’s re-treading the first and second movies.
I genuinely can’t think of a single blockbuster movie where an an animated sequel series would be an inherently bad idea. Honestly, any non-arthousey movie could get a sequel animated series, and I wouldn’t automatically assume it’s gonna be bad. Terminator? Lets go. Inception? Need it. The Royal Tenenbaums? Would be fucking weird but I’m gonna watch it!
so will it be like the Walking Dead where the T800s are everywhere and it’s about humans surviving one another (corrupt humans, antagonistic humans) plus dodging the robots?
I was hoping for more a Screamers (which was based on PKD’s “Second Variety”) idea where the robots keep sending new Terminators with different looks and personalities to try to infiltrate the humans. Having them all look like Arnold or Robert Patrick seems like it would be too easy to spot them.
And every time there’s a tragic death in the Resistance, Kyle Reese stumbles around in shock with his hair all wet.
The synopsis was posted on IO9:“The Terminator anime will focus on a soldier from the Human-Machine War being sent back in time to prevent it. In this case, an unnamed female soldier from the dystopian future of 2022 is blasted back to 1997 in order to protect Malcolm Lee, a scientist working on a new AI system meant to compete with Skynet, the series’ original AI threat that’s already working on how to start Judgment Day and attack humanity. As Lee and the soldier run from the Terminator that’s also been sent back in time to kill him, the events will take a noticeable toll on his three children.”So, given that the idea behind the anime is the theme for all but one of the movies, I would’ve hoped the anime would’ve given more flexibility for a story. Yes, Chronicles had time travel shenanigans, and as flawed as that show was, it stood out from the movies and the trilogy of failed reboots.I have no problem to see it just for the anime with low expectations and hoping it will be stupid fun where I can take it or leave it. But if they went a different direction like for example, the Terminator version of Mega Man with no further details, then I would be like fuck yeah I can’t wait. I just don’t have that much enthusiasm for that kind of premise again when it involves Terminator.
This sounds like a much better idea than trying to do yet another movie with diminishing returns. The only way to make it perfect is go get Conan O’Brien to do his Arnold impersonation for the robots.
Well, at least it’s being animated by an actual anime studio instead of just calling itself anime because it seems like everything animated is calling itself anime nowadays.I think they should do vegans do with their copycat cope food and misspell / add apostrophes. “Seth MacFarlane is going to have a new amine series coming out after family guy”“I’m really looking forward to the new Call of Duty an’may”