Terminator to become the anime series it was always destined to be

At long last, the Terminator franchise—a massively convoluted sci-fi opus with too many characters, bizarre inter-generational romantic relationships, and more ret-coning and timeline erasing than you can shake a severed android limb at—is finally ready to ascend to its most fitting and perfect form: Anime.

That’s right: Per Deadline, Netflix has just named the Terminator films as its next attempt at rampant anime-ification of existing brands, announcing that animation studio Production I.G. is making an anime version of everyone’s favorite time travel-heavy robot war, with The Batman’s Mattson Tomlin set so serve as showrunner and executive producer.

This is, somewhat surprisingly, the very first time that the Terminator has been adapted for animation. Although there have been plenty of comic books set in the films’ various universes (universi?), the new series is the first instance in which someone said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cheaper just to draw Arnold Schwarzenegger with half his skin hanging off his metal endoskeleton while evil robot helicopters fly around nuking the place?” That’s assume a recognizable Arnie will even be part of this version; given how many different abortive sequels to T2 there have been over the years—Rise Of The Machines, Salvation, Dark Fate, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Gynysys—almost all contradictory of each other in some way or another, Tomlin and his producers presumably have a free hand to pick out whatever they want from the permanently ongoing Skynet-human conflicts.

Tomlin himself promised that his series would be one that “breaks conventions, subverts expectations and has real guts,” and, really, honestly: Why not anime? It worked for Castlevania, and that one doesn’t have even one phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range to get the mecha nerds salivating.