Terminator TV Series To Follow Next Movie
A long gestating Terminator TV Series looks to finally be moving forward just days after Skydance Productions head honcho David Ellison spoke of the difficulties in bring Star Trek back to the small screen.
Speaking to the press, Ellison said: “It’s something that we’re developing as we speak. 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, along with Terminator Genisys, a Terminator TV series was announced back in 2013 the plot was concerned with "a critical moment from the first Terminator film and where the film's story goes one way, the upcoming series will take the same moment in a completely different direction".
Which seems to suggest that the key dividing moment may have been bumped a film along.
Furthermore, "as the rebooted film trilogy and the new TV series progress, the two narratives will intersect with each other in some surprising and dramatic ways".
At the time the series was to be executive produced by Ashley Miller and Zack Stetntz, who did writing work on Thor and X-Men: First Class.
So it sounds exactly like the kind of world-building that Marvel have made vogue.
However, whether or not there is a great desire to see an ancillary Terminator series remains to be seen. Spin off media is a tricky business. The genuinely excellent The Sarah Connor Chronicles enjoyed cult success over abruptly cancelled two season run. However, that was largely kept within its own universe.
Can a crossover arc between different mediums capture audiences in the same way an established universe like Marvel has?