Ever since it was announced that James Cameron was getting involved in the Terminator franchise again, there has been one, malingering question on everybody’s minds. With the four sequels’ tangled, increasingly suspect continuity, what was going to be canon in the new series?
It’s an awkward question being asked of a lot of franchises these days. Did Logan take place in the future of the X-Men films, or can the franchise branch off in an entirely different direction with their upcoming adaptation of the Dark Phoenix Saga? What version of The Joker will be a part of the DCEU and which ones will just appear in non-canon side-films? Exactly which Halloween films will the upcoming sequel acknowledge, and which ones will be left by the wayside?
Although we had already gotten confirmation from Cameron himself that the new movie will ignore Terminator Genisys: the ill-received latest installment in the franchise. And while he made no promises at the time of further cuts to the continuity, I’ve gone so far as to suggest that the series could easily lose everything that followed Terminator 2 and be all the better for it.
As it turns out, this is exactly what the franchise is doing. In a recent interview, Cameron has gone on-record with the approach that he and director Tim Miller plan to take with the new film. He stated:
“This is a continuation of the story from Terminator 1 and Terminator 2. And we’re pretending the other films were a bad dream. Or an alternate timeline, which is permissible in our multi-verse. This was really driven more by [Tim] than anybody, surprisingly, because I came in pretty agnostic about where we took it. The only thing I insisted on was that we somehow revamp it and reinvent it for the 21st century.”
It makes perfect sense (to me at least) that everything Rise of the Machines forward would be cut from the continuity. Next to nobody liked Genisys, sure, but the same thing could be said about Salvation, which took the franchise into the futuristic war against the machines that turned out to be a whole lot less interesting than it was as the backstory of the first movies. And while Rise of the Machines had a clever justification for why Judgment Day still occurs despite the events of, well, Judgment Day supposedly erasing that from the timeline, nothing else about it worked: from its dumbstruck leads to its recycled villain to how desperately they were trying to make Schwarzenegger look decades younger than he really was.
Judgment Day was the last time that the franchise was even remotely good, and anything beyond that merely drags the new sequel’s potential down with a lot of bad movies that nobody really wants to remember unless they have to.
This, of course, means that they will need to find a new reason for time travelling robotic assassins to still be gunning after the Connors long after they were supposedly put down for good, but I trust Cameron and Miller to figure that out without too many problems. As long as the rest of the movie is on par with what we used to expect from this franchise, count me excited for it.
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