Netflix's Terminator: The Anime Series Will Restore The Franchise To Its Former Glory

Netflix, Skydance, Production I.G. and Mattson Tomlin have decided to work together to revive the Terminator franchise with Terminator: The Anime Series. With each attempt to bring that fantastic world to life, it has fallen further out of grace. Still, this new Netflix anime has the potential to restore the franchise to its former glory.

When James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd first created the Terminator franchise in 1984, they had no idea what it would turn into in the future. As the universe expanded with Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation, Terminator Genisys, and finally Terminator: Dark Fate, the hope was that the franchise would improve with every new iteration of the IP, but unfortunately the opposite happened.

Eventually, it got to the point where it felt like each new iteration was flogging a dead horse, driving fans of the beloved franchise further away with each one after the second, coincidentally, the last Terminator movie directed by James Cameron.

Terminator: The Anime Series Will Restore The Franchise To Its Former Glory

Netflix has been reviving properties lately. Each time they add a movie or series to their streaming service, more often than not, they breathe new life into it and make people fall in love with it again. Even that didn’t work for The Terminator. Adding the movies to the streaming platform didn’t change how fans felt about it, so Netflix had to pull out the only trick left and turn it into an anime.

Details about the actual anime are scarce as the trailer hasn’t included any visuals in the announcement trailer other than some really epic typography that tells us it is definitely Terminator and that the series is set in 1997 on the 30^th of August, which is apparently two days before everything in the world changes. Suppose you know anything about the Terminator franchise. In that case, the premise of it is essentially a race against time to try and prevent the end of the world when machines take over.

Considering that some franchise issues have been choked up to bag budget, bad acting, bad CGI, or just being well ahead of its time, these are all issues that can be easily avoided by creating an anime. With a skilled animation studio like Production I.G. (who are the masterminds behind hit anime like Guilty Crown, Psycho-Pass and even Ghost in the Shell), there are essentially no constraints holding this anime back. With a high-octane concept like Terminator, it seems that Netflix might finally be able to do the universe justice.

While the official announcement trailer tells us very little, it does share a date. Canonically, Judgement Day was on the 29^th of August, 1997, so the timeline is changing. Still, this lets us speculate that the anime will reboot the franchise, starting again and fixing what the live-action film franchise broke about the concept.

The official announcement trailer for Terminator: The Anime Series was released to Netflix’s YouTube channel on the 12^th of November, 2023, and unfortunately, the only details that we have about when Terminator will be added to Netflix is “soon”, so stay tuned to us, or their YouTube channel for updates on when you can watch this epic series for yourself.