Paramount Pictures is already feeling pretty bullish on its new Terminator film, Terminator: Genisys (that subtitle is still idiotic), as they recently staked out release dates for two sequels to drop in 2017 and 2018, with the plan to shoot them back-to-back. We still know very little about the nature of Genisys (*shudder*), but we do know that the lead actors are playing Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney), John Connor (Jason Clarke), and Danny Dyson (Dayo Okeniyi) under the direction of Thor: The Dark World helmer Alan Taylor. Oh yeah, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is back.
Courtney recently spoke a bit about the film, revealing that the Terminator: Genisys rating will most likely be PG-13 and describing it as not exactly a reboot but not exactly a sequel either. Read on after the jump.
Speaking with The Arnold Fans (via CS), Courtney confirmed that this new Terminator film will follow in the footsteps of the last two features and will almost certainly be PG-13:
"I would love to see it be rated R, but I don't think it will. I think in this day & age, it's much more likely to be PG-13. There were no f-bombs. But there'll be a healthy amount of movie violence."
That’s definitely disappointing seeing as how the first two films—and consequently the best—were unabashedly rated R, but in this day and age studios simply aren’t building franchises around anything above a PG-13. Here’s hoping the story is strong enough to overcome the lack of grit and hard-edge.
The actor also told The Arnold Fans that the plan is to shoot the two sequels back-to-back in 2016 (probably with Schwarzenegger in tow), assuming the first one takes off at the box office that is:
"Hard to imagine a Terminator film without Arnold. I guess we start filming - I think the plan is do the next 2 back to back in 2016."
Additionally, in an interview with The Huffington Post, Courtney attempted to describe the film’s connection to the previous Terminator movies:
"What I can say is that we start in a place we're familiar with from the early films and then, you know, circumstances change. It somewhat shifts the course of events from that point. It's not necessarily a sequel or a reboot. I don't even know how you brand it correctly. We're not remaking one of the early Terminator movies. And it doesn't necessarily carry on from the point where we left off."
Given the time travel aspects, inclusion of the original characters, and potential for altering the timeline, it very much sounds like Genisys will be not unlike J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot in relation to the franchise as a whole. That’s a promising notion, but we haven’t seen a good Terminator film since T2 so I remain cautiously optimistic. Terminator: Genisys opens in theaters on July 1, 2015.
