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Almost 18 months ago Megan Ellison paid $20 million for the rights to the Terminator franchise so that she could develop a fifth Terminator film. At the time Justin Lin was brought on board to help develop it, and even Arnold Schwarznegger attached himself to the project. Things seemed to be moving forward with it until Lin dropped out of the project to focus on his Fast and Furious franchise. After he left we didn't hear much about the project and it seemed to fall into limbo.
Deadline reports today that Megan has hired her brother David Ellison to produce the film. As of right now there's no director or studio attached, but I image that is what David is going to help bring together. This is one of those projects that needs to go into production at some point because according to new copyright laws for North America, rights to The Terminator will revert back to creator James Cameron in 2019. I doubt Cameron will do anything with it then, but it's one of the main reason why studios don't want to get involved with the movie. They don't want to move forward on a project with a potential rights war waiting to happen.
Originally there were supposed to be three movies made, but since the rights revert back to Cameron in 2019 that was scaled back to only two because of the time frame they have to work with. As of right now it looks like they are starting from scratch on everything. If they're able to get things up an running on these Terminator films, hopefully they can bring together a great team that can do it right.
Megan and David Ellison were both executive producers on the Coen Brothers wester True Grit, and have both independently produced films as well. Megan produced Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, John Hillcoat’s Lawless, Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly and the upcoming David O Russell-directed Abscam movie with Christian Bale and Bradley Cooper, all through her Annapurna Pictures. As for David and his Skydance Productions, he's worked on Mission: Impossible–Ghost Protocol, Jack Reacher, World War Z, G.I. Joe 2: Retaliation, Star Trek into Darkness and Jack Ryan. As you can see he has more experience with the big budget popcorn films.
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