After the recent attempted and largely failed attempts at reviving interest in the ‘Terminator’ universe, it seems the franchise is at a bit of a crossroads. With the rights to the series having bounced between multiple production companies, the franchise has seemed largely aimless as of late, with the most recent three films – ‘Terminator: Rise of the Machines,’ ‘Terminator: Salvation,’ and ‘Terminator: Genisys‘ – mostly failing to entice fans at the box office and beyond. In fact, ‘Genisys’ was the first of a planned new trilogy, but thanks to poor reviews and theatrical performance, those plans have been quietly scrapped.
Recently, German filmmaker and ridiculously long-named human being Bruce Stirling John Knox has created an animated short as a sort of “pitch” to studios (or anyone, really) for his script for a story that would take the Terminator franchise in a new direction. In the animated ‘Extinction,’ the action moves to 2047, years after the fall of the evil SkyNet corporation, and the humans have a radical new idea in an attempt to permanently shut down the remaining roving Terminator units.
In an interesting bit of trivia, James Cameron actually gets the rights to the Terminator series back to him in 2019. In 1984, when he created the idea for the film as a at-the-time completely unknown and unproven filmmaker, he was forced to sell the rights to the franchise for a whopping $1 in exchange for the opportunity to direct the film himself. After 35 long years, the rights will finally be coming home; what he will do with them, if anything, remains to be seen.
Anyhow, check out the video for ‘Extermination’ and let us know your thoughts in the comments below: is this a direction you’d be interested in seeing the franchise take?
Tony Schaab firmly believes that a viewing of ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’ should be a mandatory bi-weekly experience and that a re-read-through of the original 7 manga volumes of the story should occupy every off week. A lover of most things sci-fi and horror, Tony is an author by day and a DJ by night. Come hang out with Tony on Facebook and Twitter to hear him spew semi-funny nonsense and get your opportunity to finally put him in his place.
