The Terminator franchise has been in desperate need of a fresh new perspective since the post-Terminator 2: Judgement Day installments fell short of expectations. From early indications, Netflix’s Terminator Zero anime aims to go beyond the popular characters that James Cameron conceived. Beyond its new setting within the war-ravaged future caused by Skynet, Terminator Zero will be the first franchise release not only in an animated medium but also excluding Sarah Connor and her resistance leader son John.

Speaking to Polygon for an interview about the upcoming Netflix series, Terminator Zero showrunner Mattson Tomlin was asked about the challenges of telling a new story without the iconic characters from the movies. Though he was vague about making the post-T2 sequels cannon to the series, Tomlin appreciated each installment’s respective filmmakers.

“Was it a challenge? No, not really. I think that the movies have been doing the Connors for a long time, and in doing this show, I really wanted to respect the incredible artists that had worked on this franchise before me, and that’s going from the first movie all the way through the last movie.”

Tomlin continued by explaining that excluding the Connors does not take away from the core themes of family and destiny in Terminator Zero. He referred to the underlying storylines of Cameron’s first two installments as inspiration for the series’ take on the lead character Malcolm Lee (André Holland) serving humanity while struggling to be a parent.

“That first movie is a love story about a man and a woman making a baby, because that baby is very important, but in the context of the movie, it’s just, Here’s a couple coming together. And then that second movie is a story about a mother’s love for her son, and meanwhile, there’s [this] surrogate father who’s come in, who has the face of the guy who tried to kill her before, and she has to reconcile what that means. And so I think, for Terminator Zero, it was important to make sure that we had killer robots, the nuclear apocalypse, and a family story that really had dramatic weight. That, for me, is what Terminator is.”

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Terminator Zero’s Lee is the series’ version of T2’s Miles Dyson as he develops an AI program called Kokoro (Rosario Dawson). Wieth Kokoro designed as competition, Skynet sends a terminator to Lee’s time to wipe him out along with his family, Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno), a resistance soldier from 2022 Japan arrives to be his protector. Additionally, the series breaks away from the Los Angeles setting of the movies and looks at the future war in the eastern part of the world.

“I’m working with partners in Japan, and I wanted to lean into that strength, so it suddenly dawned on me, we don’t know what’s going on in Japan. Like, there’s no mention anywhere in the franchise about what’s going on really anywhere else in the world. OK, like, Russia launches their nukes, got it. But then what’s going on anywhere else in the world?”

Terminator Zero also features Justified’s Timothy Olyphant as the voice of the Terminator. Skydance Television’s David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Don Granger serve as executive producers with Production I.G. handling the animation. The eight-episode series will arrive on Netflix on August 29th.

Are you excited about Terminator Zero? Do you think it will reignite interest in the Terminator franchise? Let us know in the comment section below.

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