For quite some time now I’ve felt a slight disappointment in James Cameron; I would’ve been less annoyed with him had he made a third and final Terminator movie. Sadly T3 didn’t tick the right box – it was average to say the least. Jim said that he had told his story (T1 & T2), but then why did things feel so incomplete to a majority of fans? We never got a sense of closure that Star Wars fans did (with a fully rounded trilogy).
For years now, we at TheTerminatorFans.com have stated that a Jim Cameron Terminator 3 nearly happened around 1996, and finally for the first time since we made those claims, Jim Cameron has validated it in an interview at a special screening of Terminator 1 and 2 in Hollywood. We are so glad this is now a fact we can share with the Terminator Fans.
“There was a point in time where I debated going after the rights. Carolco Pictures was failing and in bankruptcy and the rights were in play.”
Carolco Pictures went bust in 1996 due to the awful Cutthroat Island, a lackluster swashbuckling pirate adventure movie.
Jim discussed how he very nearly tried to make a Terminator 3 happen just before Titanic (1997), and briefly considered it afterwards too (1998-2000) but he distanced himself from pursuing it, and sounds as though he gave up and moved on from it to create a new franchise he could call his own, this later became the Avatar series.
When questioned about the upcoming Terminator: Genesis he answered with the following:
“I pay attention to [the upcoming Terminator film] but I’m not terribly concerned about it one-way or the other. I’ve let it go. There was a point in time where I debated going after the rights. Carolco Pictures was failing and in bankruptcy and the rights were in play. I talked briefly to 20th Century Fox about it. At a certain point, I think I was finishing Titanic at the time and I just felt as a filmmaker maybe I’ve gone beyond it. I really wasn’t that interested. I felt like I’d told the story I wanted to tell. I suppose I could have pursued it more aggressively and gone to the mat for it but I felt like I was laboring in someone else’s house to an extent because I had sold the rights very early on. Basically I went from being a truck driver to being a filmmaker and part of my dues was that I sold the rights to The Terminator in order to keep myself attached as a director. And the outcome was fine. The rest of my career really hinged on that. But I no longer had control of it. I thought to myself why don’t I just create my own new thing that I’ll have control over the IP.
So I let it go and in the act of letting it go, I now have to live with the consequences of that — which is I can’t get too emotionally involved.”
James Cameron
It simply sounded like Jim didn’t have the fight in him to go for it, though he did have power in Hollywood and if he had been aggressive enough – he could have made it happen.
To us it sounds like Jim never lost his soft spot for the Terminator franchise.
We have originally reported that the rights, legally, will revert back to Cameron in 2018, although the year 2017 has started to be thrown around but we would say 2018; as that seemed to be an in-joke that Halcyon made by setting Terminator Salvation in 2018.
If Arnold Schwarzenegger can stay in top shape for these next few years – would you like to see James Cameron return to writing and directing one big, brash and final James Cameron Terminator movie?
Source: LA Times
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5 Comments
Cameron on board would be mind-blowingly amazing but no Arnie!
Would be nice to see Terminator movies by Jim or an Aliens movie. The big blue smurfs don’t work with me Jim…
I don’t think he’s interested in the franchise anymore. New Avatar trilogy is on the way (and it’s gonna be shit), Avatar = more cash, more fame, more everything. And I think Arnold is already too old for this. Too bad it didn’t happen back in 1996. It could be THE final Terminator movie, the real one.
Now, I think that even Cameron struggles to direct a decent movie (because Avatar is shit).
I think we/they should let it (the franchise) rest (like forever) after the Genesis trilogy (if it happens).
Read the original T2 treatment. There’s the impetus for a third Cameron Terminator movie in the first twenty pages of that script. I want to see the movie of John Connor and Reese fighting to get to the Time Displacement equipment, and what goes down at that moment. I think it would be a kick-ass race against “Time” if you will, and would be executed wonderfully if even written by Cameron, and directed by someone he hand-picks. I don’t understand why nobody makes this movie. The storyboards even exist. This is what Terminator Salvation should have been.
It’s been in my opinion … first off the original terminator film scared me to death as a child and made me kind of root for the machines. After T2 I kind of feel like James Cameron’s work is far from completion. I’ll always be a fan of the first terminator and I only wish that mr. James Cameron would go in and revamp it … with more gore and action whilst writing off everything after T2.