Following her last appearance as Sarah Connor in 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate, Linda Hamilton has said “Hasta la vista, baby” to the Terminator franchise.
“I’m done. I’m done. I have nothing more to say,” Hamilton said in an interview with Business Insider ahead of the Season 3 premiere of Resident Alien. “The story’s been told, and it’s been done to death. Why anybody would relaunch it is a mystery to me. But I know our Hollywood world is built on relaunches right now.”
In 1984, Hamilton became an overnight star as Sarah Connor in James Cameron’s The Terminator. Sarah began as an innocent woman hunted by the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) sent from the future to prevent the birth of human resistance leader John Connor. Hamilton became even more iconic in the 1991 blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgement Day where Sarah evolved into a cold warrior hellbent on ensuring her son’s survival while forming an uneasy alliance with a reprogramed T-800 model.
Despite the massive success of Cameron’s initial Terminator installments, the sequels that followed T2 were met with mixed results. Aside from a voiceover cameo in 2009’s Terminator Salvation, Hamilton avoided the franchise until she reprised Sarah as an aging, burned-out heroine in the Cameron-produced Dark Fate. Underperforming with critics and audiences at the time of release, Cameron reflected on the movie’s failure being due in part to the advanced ages of Hamilton and Schwarzenegger.
“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,” Cameron said. “And we didn’t see that. We loved it, we thought it was cool, you know, that we were making this sort of direct sequel to a movie that came out in 1991. And young movie-going audiences weren’t born. They wouldn’t even have been born for another 10 years.”
The future of the Terminator franchise
In 2023, Cameron announced at Dell Tech World that he began writing a new Terminator installment, “but wants to see how #AI shakes out before he goes any further.” While the project remains in the writing phase, Netflix is moving forward with a Terminator anime series from Skydance. The upcoming series will be overseen by writer/showrunner Mattson Tomlin (The Batman Part II), director Masashi Kudo (Bleach), and animation studio Production IG (Ghost in the Shell). At the time of this writing, Terminator: The Anime Series does not have a premiere date.
