A new TERMINATOR TV series is in development

The highly-anticipated Terminator: Genisys hits the big screen this Friday, and while out doing the press rounds ahead of the release Skydance Productions’ CEO David Ellison and CCO Dana Goldberg spoke a bit more (via Collider) about another project they’re busy developing – a new Terminator TV series!

Whenever talk turns to TV series that were cancelled before their time Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles invariably comes up as it was an excellent show that also expanded upon the Terminator universe, and unfortunately was a casualty of the 2007 writers strike. Ellison confirmed that expanding the world is something they’re definitely looking at doing as well, across multiple platforms.

It’s something that we’re developing as we speak. To speak kind of larger to that, one of the things we would love to do at Skydance—it’s a very lofty goal—is to build worlds across multiple mediums. And to me, I think everyone talks in Hollywood about franchises, ‘it’s a franchise business, it’s a franchise business’. I think that’s a slightly old-fashioned word, and I think it’s a world creation business.

The dream for us would be to be able to obviously make films, television shows, we have a video game with Glu, comic books, and they all should be standalone experiences. If you just watch the movies or if you just watch a television show, it’s a complete experience. But if you are the kind of fans that we are over this material, and you watch all of it collectively, it all interweaves to feel like a larger universe that you can experience if you’re a huge fan of Terminator or any of the other franchises that we’re fortunate to work on, that’s really when you talk about the future of Skydance, one of the things that we really want to be a part of building.

When pressed on whether the (potential) series would connect to the movie(s), similar to how Marvel’s TV series and movies do, Ellison replied:

A little premature to be able to say, but I will say anything we do along those lines, it will absolutely have connective tissue. It would be a mistake and a little old-fashioned to have a television show and a movie, both based on something that actually don’t cross over in any way, shape, or form.

However Dana Goldberg was quick to add, “So we’re working on it, to answer your question.”

Ellison was also asked whether they’re looking at having a shorter 13-episode series, like we see mainly on cable networks like HBO or streaming platforms like Netflix, or the traditionally longer regular network series:

Our gut aspiration would be a cable-driven show for something like Terminator. It’s amazing to be in the network space. We have not been a part of it yet, but obviously when you’re focused on making 13 episodes, it allows you to have more development time to dive deeper. That being said, there have been amazing shows on network television. I really think it depends on what executives and who wants to do what at what particular point in time.

Clearly they’re still in the very early stages of development and haven’t gone much further than initial discussions about what they’d like to do, but even that is enough to make me a little giddy. Should Terminator: Genisys be a success, and every indication so far is that it looks very good, I think we can be reasonably certain that development of a TV series will begin in earnest. And the possibility it could end up somewhere like HBO or Netflix, even better.

Would you be glad to see a Terminator or two on the small screen again? Where would you like it to go?

Last Updated: June 30, 2015