Although James Cameron was more than prepared to step out and promote Terminator: Genisys, it seems now that the director is more than happy to consign it to the trash heap of history to make way for his and Tim Miller's revamp.

In a wide-ranging interview with THR, Cameron explained what he's doing with the sixth Terminator in no uncertain terms. "This is a continuation of the story from Terminator 1 and Terminator 2. And we’re pretending the other films were a bad dream. Or an alternate timeline, which is permissible in our multi-verse. This was really driven more by (Tim) than anybody, surprisingly, because I came in pretty agnostic about where we took it. The only thing I insisted on was that we somehow revamp it and reinvent it for the 21st century."

On the topic of both Linda Hamilton, Cameron's ex-wife no less, and Arnold Schwarzenegger returning, Cameron was pretty open about it. According to him, "Arnold just expected to come back," but with Hamilton, it was something else. According to Tim Miller, "Jim was f*cking terrified."

As Cameron tells it, he really was. "It took me a week just to get up the nerve. No, that's not true. Linda and I have a great relationship. We've stayed friends through the thick and thin of it all. And she is the mother of my eldest daughter. So I called her up, and I said: 'Look, we could rest on our laurels. It's ours to lose, in a sense. We created this thing several decades ago. But, here's what can be really cool. You can come back and show everybody how it's done.' Because in my mind, it hasn't been done a whole lot since the way she did it back in '91."

By the sounds of it, Cameron is intending this to be a situation not entirely unlike The Force Awakens. "A lot of this is handing off the baton to a new generation of characters. We're starting a search for an 18-something young woman to essentially be the new centerpiece of these stories. And then a number of other characters around her and characters from the future. We still fold time in the story in intriguing ways. But we have Arnold's character and Linda's character to anchor it. Somewhere across there, and I won't say where, the baton gets passed, so to speak."

So, expect Linda Hamilton to get impaled with a lightsaber at the end of the film and thrown off a bridge by her emo son, Edward Furlong. Gotcha.

The as-yet untitled sixth Terminator with hit screens on July 6th, 2019.

 

Via THR