Judgement Day has come for Terminator Zero as creator Mattson Tomlin confirms we won’t be getting a second season.
Terminator Zero is no more! The most recent attempt to reinvigorate the ailing science fiction franchise debuted on Netflix on, appropriately enough, August 29, 2024 (August 29 being the original date of Judgement Day in the series) and offered us eight episodes of anime android action, a very different but smart take on the increasingly complicated Terminator mythos.
And that’s all we’re going to get, with the series becoming the sixth failed attempt, by my count at least, to reboot the sci-fi thriller that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star, joining Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, Terminator: Salvation, Terminator: Genisys, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on the great junkheap of Futures That Shall Not Come. But that’s the great thing about this series – from a certain angle, they’re all still in canon, just possible futures branching off, as Kyle Reese once poorly explained.
Terminator Zero creator Mattson Tomlin took some time off from writing The Batman Part II to offer a more coherent explanation for the series’ demise.
“It was cancelled. 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 season’s 2 and 3, but I’m also very happy with how it feels contained as is.”
Tomlin went to on to confirm that he’d finished scripts for a second season and had mapped out a full five season arc, but ultimately the numbers didn’t work, which he attributes to misreading the potential audience.
“Generally speaking, anime audiences skew younger. Terminator audiences skew older. Terminator Zero asked them to meet in the middle, and they didn’t in the way the corporation needed to justify the spend to continue. I’m extremely grateful to the people who have watched it.”
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