The new installment is expected to be released on July 26, 2019, and will be a direct sequel to Cameron’s "Terminator 2: Judgement Day," which hit screens back in 1991. Earlier it was confirmed that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton are coming back to the franchise.
Since 1991, Cameron was absent from the franchise and the three films made without his involvement have turned off fans and have been both a critical and box office disappointment. Now, Cameron is set to restart the once broken franchise as a producer, and filmmaker Tim Miller, known for his highly acclaimed debut "Deadpool," will sit in the director’s chair.
The new film will resume the story of Terminator 1 (1984) and Terminator 2.
"We're pretending the other films were a bad dream," Cameron said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
"I look at what's happening now with the emergence of artificial general intelligence equal to or greater than humans,' and you've got Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking and others saying that this could be really bad for the survival of the human race. … The first two Terminator films that I did dealt with the angst around that and how we reconcile it for ourselves in a fantasy context. So I got excited about the idea of finding a story that made sense for now," the filmmaker said.
Cameron also confessed that he was always "scared" and at the same time "seduced" by it. According to the director, the machines "have already won against humanity," as now people are "co-evolving" and "merging" with the technology we create.
"The technology is becoming a mirror to us as we start to build humanoid robots and as we start to seriously build AGI – general intelligence – that's our equal. Some of the top scientists in artificial intelligence say that's 10 to 30 years from now. We need to get the damn movies done before that actually happens!" he said.
Neither Cameron nor Miller gave details on the plot of the new movie, but the "Deadpool" director shed some light on character attributes of the new Terminator cyborg.
"Emotionally and intellectually he will have evolved. They’re learning machines. But that’s a way to make it different than it was. I think we should embrace his age. And that’s what’s going to make it interesting and fresh for the fans," he told The Hollywood Reporter.