[Discussion] James Cameron hands you the Terminator franchise. What do you do with it?

All of the modern films keep bringing the Terminator forward in time, which often ends up being lame. I think we strip away most of the future nonsense. Skynet has decided the Connors bloodline in 1984 is too powerful, so they send a Terminator back to 1884 to try and cut it off at an earlier date. The Terminator has to fight cowboys in the American West.
- Predator (Prey) did something similar and it was fucking awesome
  
  That's basically what was in my mind. I think doing a sci-fi action movie set in the past is criminally underdone.
- But due to the Butterfly Effect, going back in time that far might prevent Skynet from happening as well.
  
  I think one of the themes of modern Terminator films is that Skynet is kinda inevitable, so in typical Hollywood fashion we just won't care about it.
- Cowboys and AI-liens

I let the guys from red letter media write the script and then let Eli Roth direct it.
- So your plan is to kill the franchise so hard that nobody will ever want to touch it again? I like it.
- Rich Evans gets to play a guy in the beginning of the movie who gets killed by a Terminator: "Oh my gODDDddd." Then the Terminator impersonates him while going on a killing spree.

Hand it to a bunch of Japanese light novel authors and see what trashy kawaii/Isekai/op-mc stories result. That, or put it into the public domain and see the popularity of the franchise explode.
- I think in reality I would milk it for personal gain, but in this hypothetical thought experiment I'd also like to imagine putting it into public domain.
  Yes we would certainly see a lot of trash, but I'd imagine that it would also lead to a lot of creativity. We really are hampered by the insanely long copyright durations.
  Sherlock Holmes for example has been part of general culture for a long time, and yet the last novel only became public domain 2023. Considering how much the world changed between now and 1927 (when it was published) it really doesn't make sense. And the argument for copyright that invention needs to pay also falls flat, when it extends so long even after the authors death.
  
  Even a licensing fee of 1% of profits or a flat $1000 would still make a lot of money and would get a lot of interest in the ip

Destroy it and his legacy?
Why?
Because its the industry standard. Don't question it.

We find out early on that the original John Connor was never the son of Sarah Connor, but just some random guy who rose to the challenge and became the leader of the human resistance. Knowing that the machines had developed time travel, he adopted the name and history of some random dead guy and leaked this to the machines, knowing they would go back and try to kill them. He sent Kyle back to protect them, with the plan of conceiving John Connor and raising him up as an even better leader.
Cut back to the future war, and now there are two John Connors.
- And they are roommates

Sell it

Terminator: ReGenisys
Written and Produced by John Travolta
Directed by John Woo
Starring Adam Baldwin and Samantha Mathis

Just delete everything after 2, sit back, and feel that all is right with the world.

I think I'd honestly reboot it. A remake of the original Terminator could work really well, maybe even as a limited series. Sarah and Kyle have to stay on the run from a perfect hunting machine.
If low budget, stick to the tension and horror elements. If high budget, intercut with scenes of the future war that John is leading to make the stakes clearer.
If that works, then I'd probably adapt elements of T2 and later films into a new story line for second season, maybe borrowing from T3 or the SCC show. T2 is an action masterpiece and you could only do worse trying to replicate it.
I would definitely stick to human actors and humanoid machines. Later movies tried to be more realistic with drones that look like actual military drones. Those are scary, but don't make for good TV because people want a humanoid bad guy. I might incorporate dog robots though, those are pretty freaky.
Ultimately, you want to be true to the themes of the series. Drone warfare and the dangers of combat automation are certainly part of that, but also the fear of infiltration (very cold war coded) and the fear of inevitability (time is shown to be inflexible, often represented in the series by time travel, nukes, and judgment day itself.

This is something I've wanted to do for a while.
Terminator 2. First movie plays out exactly the same. Second one starts at night. We see Arnie S. walking through a devastated urban landscape. He pauses outside a particularly shabby looking hovel, then bursts in and machine guns everyone inside. In the background we see a TV set. It's giving a foreign language news report of the massacre at a Los Angeles police station. The sketch of the suspect is [naturally] Arnie.
The Arnie we see is a CIA black ops assassin known as 'The Terminator.' When his handlers pick him up they drug him and put him on a plane to LA. We find out that the upper levels have decided that they need to throw him under the bus rather than risk having the press and Congress find out that they've been using him for years. They know he couldn't have been the one who killed all the cops, but they can't risk someone who knows him identifying him.
Meanwhile, the cyborg hand has crawled away from the scene. It has most the information of the main computer and can take over almost any advanced machine. It can't, for example, take over a 1950's car with no onboard computer, but a modern Tesla would be completely taken over.
We also have the daughter of the Paul Winfeild character. She's a police detective in her own right, and is investigating what happened to her father. She knows that Sarah Connor is somehow involved. Call her "Pam" because if they'd made the movie in the 1980's Pam Grier would have been perfect.
So, you've got Pam chasing Sarah and Arnie [who escapes as soon as his plane lands in LA] while the hand is hidden in a computer server farm. The hand is monitoring the internet and radio, and can control things like helicopters.
Details to follow...

A video game. Terminator crossed with Helldivers, set on a big open battlefield in the future.
The resistance is controlled by the players, AI controls the machines. Players can conquer time machines to go back in time. There they clear small side missions to change the battlefield in the future.
- Okay wait a second this is pretty huge.
  Take your idea, incorporate a StarCraft element in terms of enemy numbers. Succeeding in a back in time event wipes put a portion of current time enemies, but failing on adds more of them or wipes out part of your team (maybe the members from back in time don't come back for the rest of the round)
  
  Yea. that is pretty much what I had in mind. A huge persistent battlefield with an ever changing frontline. Players who fail the time travel missions lose their character, but succeeding sents equipment or units to the future or hinders Skynet in some way.

I don't know if it was an idea that came up during the Dark Fate production when they drafted a bunch of sci-fi writers in (I made some notes) but I'd do something that plays with all the films and the nature of time travel. Because travelling back in time doesn't change the future, it creates a different timeline, so the Terminator films (and possible) futures all exist on a continually branching framework and, after each jump back, they thwart one AI's plans but it seems like AIs are almost inevitable, so you just change track to another grim future. So the characters finally realise this and devise a way to jump between timelines, bring together different versions to solve the problem and break the cycle.
- That's a cool idea, let's make it the finale of a 7 part Terminator movie series. Final film debuts 2028!
  
  It would have to as it would essentially kill the franchise. Or would it?

Hand it to Kathleen Kennedy. She totally knows what she's doing.

Terminator hentai

Make some actually good video games based on the IP.