James Cameron is not only the box office champion of the world (depending how you shuffle the stats), but he’s also responsible for not one, but two of the greatest sequels of all time.
Cameron is responsible for upping the ante with Aliens, the action-opacked sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien. He then took his own Terminator franchise to another level. In 1991 he saw the release of his Terminator 2: Judgment Day, one of the best films of all time. He set the gold standard for sequels that’s yet to be rivaled (can he do it with Avatar?).
Now, Skynet is returning sometime in 2017 with new technology…post-converted 3-D.
The franchise’s official Facebook page dropped this little nugget late last night, to go along with the below teaserposter:
“August 29th 1997: The day Skynet first became self aware.
August 29th 2016: the day you first saw the brand new poster for Terminator 2 in 3D. Coming to theaters in 2017.”
Back in June 2014 Cameron explained why he would not be converting the first Terminator, but would convert the sequel:
“You could upgrade it to 3D but it’s still pretty gritty, available light photography, low budget filmmaking. We’d spend more converting it to 3D than we spent on the movie. That feels a little imbalanced to me.”
“[TERMINATOR 2] has a kind of timeless appeal. If there was someone who was interested in doing that, and we could make a good case for the business model like, perhaps let’s say, it’s never been on screens in China which in the next few years is about to become the biggest market for films worldwide. That alone might justify the cost of a conversion which might be 6 or 7 million dollars. And then a 3D re-release might attract some eyeballs in North American and Europe and then the Chinese release, which would be the first release on the big screen, might pay for it.”
Notice that he never talks about the actual quality of the 3-D conversion, only that it makes business sense. The only reason the franchise is alive at this point is because of Terminator Genisys‘ astronomical box office numbers in China ($100 million +). Cameron mentions China. So, yes, this is a cash-grab. I don’t care what anyone says, you just cannot convert a flat image into actual three dimensions. Sure, you can fake it, but that’s not real 3-D.
Digressing, Terminator 2: Judgment Day made $520 million worldwide, which converted to today’s dollars would be over a billion.
In the sequel, a cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger), identical to the one who failed to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), must now protect her young son, John Connor (Edward Furlong), from a more advanced cyborg (Robert Patrick), made out of liquid metal.
