'The Terminator' is back...as an anime series on Netflix

When Arnold Schwarzenegger first spoke the iconic words "I'll be back" in 1984, we all assumed the Austrian Oak meant "in an anime, at some point." The subtext was there. Well, it's finally happening. Netflix announced on Saturday that the Terminator is coming back and this time he will be an anime.

Netflix and Skydance, the company that holds the rights to the long-running sci-fi franchise, have teamed up to produce an animated series based on the James Cameron-created killer robot from the future movie series.

Mattson Tomlin, who co-wrote the upcoming DC movie The Batman as well as Netflix's own superpowered movie, Project Power, will act as showrunner and executive producer. Tomlin, noting that the story is "expanding" the world originally created by James Cameron, not rebooting.

The series is being produced in partnership with Production I.G (Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, B: The Beginning) with whom Netflix has had a production line deal with since 2018.

The Netflix series marks the first-ever animated adaptation in the Terminator franchise, a series that now stands at six movies and a TV show.

The concept proved resilient and the movie helped push both men's career into overdrive, however it was with 1991's Terminator: Judgement Day, which became a box office and cultural blockbuster, that a franchise was truly born.  There have been a total of six movies of varying degrees of fan and box office success, the last one being 2019's Terminator: Dark Fate, as well as a 2008 live-action series and a couple of web shorts.

Details of the new take were not revealed but Tomlin is known for his big and dark concepts.