On August 29, 2024, the Terminator franchise received a new addition in the form of the eight-episode first season of an anime series called Terminator Zero, which came our way from Japanese animation studio Production IG and the Netflix streaming service. If you’ve been wondering why we haven’t heard anything more about the show since then… well, it’s because it has been cancelled.
Synopsis
Terminator Zero is set in the established Terminator universe but centers on new characters. Mattson Tomlin, who worked on the screenplays for The Batman and its upcoming sequel, is writer and showrunner on this series, which has the following synopsis: 2022: A future war has raged for decades between the few human survivors and an endless army of machines. 1997: The AI known as Skynet gained self-awareness and began its war against humanity.
Caught between the future and this past is a soldier sent back in time to change the fate of humanity. She arrives in 1997 to protect a scientist named Malcolm Lee who works to launch a new AI system designed to compete with Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. As Malcolm navigates the moral complexities of his creation, he is hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future which forever alters the fate of his three children.
Terminator Zero was directed by Masashi Kudō, who is best known for working on the anime series Bleach. Tomlin served as executive producer alongside David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Don Granger of Skydance.
The voice cast included Rosario Dawson (Ahsoka) as Kokoro, “An advanced AI and Japan’s answer to Skynet, if brought online, Kokoro will be endowed with the same power as Skynet. Kokoro must calculate for itself: is humanity the plague Skynet believes? Or are human beings worth saving?”; André Holland (The Knick) as Malcolm Lee, “A genius computer programmer and father of three, Malcolm Lee is haunted by prophetic nightmares of an apocalyptic future. He’s spent the last decade creating a secret artificial intelligence that he believes will be humanity’s last hope.”; Sonoya Mizuno (Crazy Rich Asians) as Eiko, “Coming from a post-Judgement Day 2022, Eiko is a resistance fighter sent back in time to stop Malcolm from launching Kokoro.”; and Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale) as The Prophet, “In the future, the Prophet is the philosophical guide for the human resistance, a light shepherding survivors in the darkness of the unknown future ahead.” Timothy Olyphant (Justified) provided the voice of a Terminator.
Cancelled
Tomlin confirmed that Terminator Zero was cancelled on social media. He wrote, “The critical and audience reception to it was tremendous, but at the end of the day not nearly enough people watched it. I would’ve loved to deliver on the Future War I had planned in seasons 2 and 3, but I’m also very happy with how it feels contained as is.
Maybe someday I’ll do a big thread about the plans I had for the full five season run. The series finale was special and it was part of my pitch to get the job. I’ve written all of the season two scripts and outlined pretty much all of season three…Maybe I will return to that world in a different form. I really do love it, and it was extremely gratifying to see so many people connect with it the way they did.“
He added, “Netflix was really great about supporting the show and giving me tremendous creative freedom to do what I wanted to do. Good partners. The show was expensive and very time consuming. The only way they could justify it was if the audience showed up for it, and they just didn’t.
I’ll also say they offered to let me do 2, maybe 3 episodes more to wrap up the story, which I declined. I felt the story I wanted to tell was much longer, and the finale of season one actually left things in a good place. But they didn’t have to offer that. Good partners here.“
Are you disappointed to hear that Terminator Zero was cancelled and Mattson Tomlin won’t be able to bring his five-season plan to the screen? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
You can read our 7/10 review of Terminator Zero at THIS LINK.
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