The Terminator will be back, in animated form, on Netflix in a new series that’s “coming soon.” As part of its Geeked Week promotion, Netflix and Skydance revealed their take on the sci-fi series originally created by James Cameron, showing the first teaser for the Terminator anime.
Netflix didn’t reveal much about the new anime series, known simply as Terminator, but it appears to be set just before the original films’ Judgment Day: Aug. 29, 1997. “Everything changes” on that date, the teaser warns.
When it was originally announced in 2021, showrunner and executive producer Mattson Tomlin said the anime series would “approach Terminator in a way that breaks conventions, subverts expectations, and has real guts.” Tomlin’s credits include writing the stories for Matt Reeves’ The Batman (and its sequel), Netflix’s Project Power, and Capcom’s planned Mega Man movie.
Production I.G, the veteran anime production studio known for its work on series like Ghost in the Shell, Haikyu!!, and Psycho-Pass, is lending its creative talents to adapt The Terminator for animation.
Whether Netflix’s anime take on Terminator will turn the struggling franchise around remains to be seen. But it can really only go up from 2019’s poorly received Terminator: Dark Fate, which brought Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton back to the franchise but was a commercial failure.