As Hollywood’s current obsession with nostalgia continues, it seems odd that one ’80s franchise is missing out on a reboot: where is Terminator?

Well, maybe we will be seeing it again, because James Cameron says he’s writing a script for a new movie, but I have no confidence we’ll ever see it, and certainly no hope it will be good.

The last time we saw it on the big screen was 2019, with Terminator: Dark Fate, a movie so dreadful that it seems to have been memory-holed by most fans. That might not seem like such a long time, but it was the same year The Predator was released (and flopped), but since then Disney has revived that franchise with Prey and Killer or Killers, and soon Predator: Badlands will arrive on our screens. Likewise, Alien: Romulus brought its sister franchise to a hilarious end in 2017, but both Alien: Romulus and the dreadful Alien: Earth have given it a new life, of sorts.

It seems like Hollywood is going against its principles by leaving a franchise dormant. Surely there’s a bit more money to be wrung from it?

The thing is, I don’t think that Terminator can have that same kind of revival. Whether or not you like them, movies like Prey and Romulus were broadly well-received, and did something to rescue their franchises’ reputations. I don’t think the same will happen with Terminator.

For a start, what’s the series actually about now?

Ever since the first movies, it’s essentially run something along the lines of “Sarah/John Connor are in danger as a Terminator is sent back in time to kill them; meanwhile the good guys send back their own man/machine to help out. Copy/Paste.”

There’s not much of a “canon” there. What’s worse, the timeline is all over the place. With things like Alien, it’s reasonably easy to work out what happens when, but Terminator has been retconned, rewritten, and time-travelled into an incomprehensible mess. If we go off Dark Fate, John Connor is now dead, Sarah Connor is unimportant, there’s a new saviour, and the T-800 is a drapes salesman.

What’s worse, this constant retconning means that neither the original two movies matter (though fans would agree they are the only ones that do) and if something does happen, then why should we care, because the next movie will just rip it all up anyway.

It’s almost impossible to dredge through all the piles of slush to find a single core element that you can build from.

It’s also a franchise that’s failed to grow throughout its four-decade history. As I say above, it’s just repeated the same story again and again. It’s never been able to break away from the formula of sending back Terminators to kill important figures in the timeline. What’s the betting any new film would do the same?

Even the reasonably entertaining Terminator: Zero anime reused the same story beats, except it was set in Japan rather than the USA. The closest we ever got to something original was Terminator: Salvation, which was another disappointment, but at least it tried.

Terminator was only ever really a single idea that made one great movie. T2 worked because it repeated the formula, but with enough twists to make it different, with a much bigger budget, and a “faster and more intense” approach to make a great sequel. But that was really the end.

The franchise can’t even take advantage of that golden selling point: nostalgia. Things like Jurassic World, Ghostbusters, and Star Wars have made good use of this, bringing back beloved characters and original actors to get audiences excited. But Terminator doesn’t have that luxury. Most of the films have featured Schwarzenegger as the T-800, and Dark Fate saw Linda Hamilton return as Sarah Connor, so even if the actors wanted to return, there’s nothing unique about it, and it’s increasingly hard to take an eighty-year-old Arnold serious as a hulking cyborg.

Maybe you could bring back Michael Biehn (and I wouldn’t put it past them) but that would just cheapen one of the franchise’s best deaths.

So why doesn’t the franchise grow a little? Well, I think it suffers from its main characters. While Ellen Ripley is the main force of the Alien movies, she’s not essential to it; other people can fight these creatures. But the Terminator franchise has made the Connors into the saviours of the world, and similar to Harry Potter, when you create a Chosen One for your story, it all falls apart when you try to move beyond them, because no matter how hard you try, they’ll always be the most important part of this universe.

While some might talk about the franchise still being “relevant” because of our worries about AI, I don’t think it is. Not only is that an old story that’s been told in dozens and hundreds of movies, books, and TV shows, there’s also the fact that our daily interactions with the technology point to more nuanced stories. Not really metal machines crushing human skulls, more just a cold, calculating, and in some ways, quite boring sinister element that could lead to humanity’s downfall, as AI becomes our sinister ruler.

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it: it’s ok for franchises to come to an end. For the past forty years Terminator has been a constant presence in movies and shows, but I think it’s outrun its premise, and that’s fine.

I wish Hollywood would let it rest, but I don’t believe they will. Soon enough someone will come forward with an idea, probably for a streaming show about John Connor and the resistance against Skynet. If I had any optimism I’d say that could be an interesting idea, but as Alien: Earth shows, there’s no reason to be optimistic about entertainment right now.

But if Hollywood cares at all about their history, they should leave it be, before more characters have their legacies destroyed, and another once-great franchise is reduced to a shallow, laughably bad imitation of itself.