Terminator Zero, an eight-episode anime series from the well-known Terminator franchise, is coming to Netflix in August 2024.
The story in the anime series continues from the events from the live-action Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the Arnold Schwarzenegger-led highest grossing film of 1991. The film’s plot revolves around Judgement Day, 29 August 1997 when Skynet, an artificial intelligence, becomes self aware and starts a war killing three billion people. To fulfil its grand plan, Skynet sends out a shape-shifting prototype terminator, the T-1000 made of indestructible liquid metal to eliminate the resistance leader John Connor when he is still a child. To combat this threat, the resistance sends out a reprogrammed T-800 terminator to protect John and his mother to ensure the birth of the resistance. This battle spans across the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century.
Honouring the events that came before it, the anime follows 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’s hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future, which forever alters the fate of his three children.
The Netflix anime adaptation will be a part of the Terminator universe but will centre around characters that viewers haven’t met yet. The anime is created and executively produced by Mattson Tomlin who expressed his vision for the series by sharing, “I was looking at the franchise and the first two movies in particular. And why are we still talking about this franchise 40 years later? You strip away killer robots, you strip away Judgment Day, what do you have left? You have stories about families.”
The cast of voiceover artists include the likes of Timothy Olyphant, Rosario Dawson, André Holland, Sonoya Mizuno, and Ann Dowd. Their character descriptions are as follows:
Timothy Olyphant (Justified, Deadwood) as The Terminator: Some things about the Terminator haven’t changed. The Terminator is still out there. It still can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you’re dead. This incarnation of the Terminator and Olyphant’s interpretation isn’t like any we’ve seen before.
Rosario Dawson (Ahsoka, Common Ground) 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 it to be? Or are human beings worth saving?
André Holland (Moonlight, The Knick) as Malcolm Lee: A genius computer programmer and father of three, 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 (House of the Dragon, Crazy Rich Asians) as Eiko: Coming from a post-Judgment Day 2022, Eiko is a resistance fighter sent back in time to stop Malcolm from launching Kokoro.
Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale, Mass) 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. “There were a couple of people that I wrote characters for,” says Tomlin, “and The Prophet was always Ann Dowd. So her dialogue was written for her cadence of voice … Her performance just rocks.”
The upcoming anime series will be executive produced by Skydance, Japan animation studio Production I.G. Tomlin, who’ll serve as the showrunner and writer for the series, previously wrote Project Power (starring Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) for Netflix and is currently writing The Batman II.
“Anyone who knows my writing knows I believe in taking big swings and going for the heart. I’m honoured that Netflix and Skydance have given me the opportunity to approach Terminator in a way that breaks conventions, subverts expectations, and has real guts.” Tomlin had said back in 2021.
Terminator Zero arrives on Netflix, 29 August.
The Terminator franchise was created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd and consists of six feature films including the 1984 The Terminator, the 1991 Terminator 2: Judgement Day followed by 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2009’s Terminator: Salvation, 2015’s Terminator Genisys and the latest 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate. The franchise has also spawned various video game adaptations.