Basically everyone agrees that the Terminator franchise peaked with 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The film, directed by James Cameron, starred Linda Hamilton as the newly-badass Sarah Connor, who has to team up with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s now-good guy T-800 to do battle against the menacing T-1000. The franchise hasn’t seen Cameron, Hamilton, and Schwarzenegger together since then — nor has it hasn’t produced a film that was nearly as good — but that’s about to change, as it’s just been announced that Hamilton will be reprising her role as Sarah Connor in the sixth Terminator film, joining the previously announced Cameron and Schwarzenegger.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cameron made the announcement himself at a private Terminator event. “As meaningful as she was to gender and action stars everywhere back then, it’s going to make a huge statement to have that seasoned warrior that she’s become return,” the filmmaker stated. “There are 50-year-old, 60-year-old guys out there [in films] killing bad guys, but there isn’t an example of that for women.” Cameron has a point. Probably the closest thing we’ve had to an older female action star is Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde, but she’s only 42 and still looks every inch a Hollywood starlet. Hamilton, by contrast, is 60, and hasn’t had a major role in a big studio film in years.
The new Terminator movie, which Cameron is producing based off his own story idea, will be directed by Deadpool‘s Tim Miller. The film is set to be a sequel to T2, which implies — though no one has said it — that Terminator 3, Terminator: Salvation, and Terminator: Genisys are all getting ret-conned. The new film, which is the start of a planned trilogy, will of course play with the timeline some, and will mostly feature new characters in addition to the two remaining stars. “We’re starting a search for an 18-something woman to be the new centerpiece of the new story,” Cameron said. “We still fold time. We will have characters from the future and the present. There will be mostly new characters, but we’ll have Arnold and Linda’s characters to anchor it.”
We’d pretty much given up hope for the Terminator franchise after Genisys, but with this news we’re psyched to see what a proper sequel to Judgement Day will actually look like. We’re betting Hamilton can still kick butt like nobody else.
