Terminator is coming back as a Netflix anime series

You could make a strong case that every Terminator project since, roughly, 2003, has been an attempt to fix the franchise—or at least to get it back on track, and return to the largely impossible highs of 1991 juggernaut T2: Judgment Day. Now, Netflix is getting ready to attempt to succeed where T3, Salvation, Genisys, Dark Fate, and, to a much less extent, The Sarah Connor Chronicles all faltered, announcing today that it’s bringing the series back as… an anime.

That’s right: Terminator is going the reverse-One Piece/Cowboy Bebop/Avatar: The Last Airbender route, with the streamer announcing today at its annual GEEKED Week celebration that the traditionally live-action series will now be revived via Japanese animation. Said news came complete with a teaser trailer, although, beyond delivering its text in both English and Japanese—and giving a few hits of those big, beefy Brad Fiedel drums on the soundtrack—it’s a very brief one that doesn’t give us much indication about what to expect from the show.

Among the various credits that flash by very quickly in the teaser, we do get one major one: Mattson Tomlin, who’s best known as an associate of The Batman director Matt Reeves, having contributed writing to Reeves’ take on the Dark Knight. He also directed, with Reeves as a producer, the 2021 film Mother/Android, in which Chloë Grace Moretz plays a young woman fighting to keep her baby alive in a world overrun by killer androids, which is about as good a trial run for making a Terminator show as you could probably hope to have. Animation duties, meanwhile, will apparently be handled by Production I.G., the extremely prolific Japanese studios whose output includes Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex, FLCL, and about a billion other anime hits.

No word yet (besides “soon”) on when the series will be available.