The New Terminator Film Finally Has A Title

Thank heaven, we can finally stop calling it ‘Terminator 6’!

With ‘Alita: Battle Angel‘ arriving in theaters this week, co-writer and producer James Cameron has been hitting the press circuit. While the focus has naturally been on ‘Alita’, it has naturally turned at times to the upcoming ‘Terminator’ reboot, which marks the first film in the series that Cameron has worked on since the release of ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ in 1991. And so it was that Cameron, speaking with Yahoo!, revealed the film’s title (which he clarified is more of a working title, at least for the moment): ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’.

Like last year’s ‘Halloween’, ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ will selectively ignore several of the prior sequels. In this case, the new timeline disregards everything after ‘Terminator 2’ (or, to put it another way, it ignores all the middling sequels that James Cameron had nothing to do with). In addition to Cameron himself – who is serving as a producer and co-writer while ‘Deadpool’ director Tim Miller takes the helm – ‘Dark Fate’ will also see the return of franchise icons Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton to their familiar roles.

And on the subject of Hamilton, Cameron also spoke a bit about the film’s approach to Sarah Connor. As he tells it, Sarah’s role in the film will address “what time and dealing with these tragic futures has done to her; how it’s hardened her even more.” If that raises an eyebrow or two? Well, it ought to. After all, the last time we saw this version of Sarah, she had been hardened by the events of (and since) the first film, but she had also reached a point where she could once again look to the future with hope. If she comes back now even harder? Well, for now we can only wonder what the last few decades have thrown at her, but it certainly doesn’t bode well for that sense of hope.

In fact, the title’s invocation of fate (a dark one, at that) would seem to place it at odds with one of the major thematic underpinnings of ‘T2’, that there is “no fate but what we make for ourselves.” Granted, that’s more a statement of philosophy than temporal mechanics and the last three sequels haven’t so much ignored that idea as ripped it to shreds, but the fact that Cameron has been involved with crafting the story this time around makes that worth pointing out. In any case, we’ll find out what Miller and Cameron have in store later this year.

In addition to Schwarzenegger and Hamilton, ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ will also star Mackenzie Davis, Gabriel Luna, Natalia Reyes, and Diego Boneta.

The film’s theatrical debut is set for November 1, 2019.