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Netflix Reveals Terminator Zero Anime to Premiere Worldwide on August 29
posted on by Joanna Cayanan
Netflix revealed on Wednesday Skydance Animation and Production I.G's Terminator Zero, the anime series based on the Terminator film franchise, which will premiere worldwide on the service on August 29. Netflix also revealed "first look photos" of the series:
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Mattson Tomlin (Project Power, The Batman II) is serving as the series' showrunner, executive producer and writer. Skydance's David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Don Granger are the executive producers. Masashi Kudo is directing the anime at Production I.G
The eight-episode series is part of the Terminator universe, but centers around new characters. Netflix describes the series' story:
2022: A future war has raged for decades between the few human survivors and an endless army of machines. 1997: The AI known as Skynet gained self-awareness and began its war against humanity.Caught between the future and this past is 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 is hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future which forever alters the fate of his three children.
The company first ordered the series in 2021, and revealed a teaser in November.
The rights holders of the Terminator franchise had planned a Termination collection of animated shorts created by leading European and Japanese "auteurs" in 2008, but the project was not released in the following year as planned. Termination would have focused on Judgment Day, the pivotal day in the Terminator franchise's multiple storylines when the Skynet defense system would launch nuclear weapons that destroy much of humanity. The iconic T-800 robot is a time-traveling weapon of Skynet, and it has been both the antagonist and protagonist in the various Terminator projects since the first film in 1984.
The T-800 did make an official, authorized cameo in the long-running Doraemon television anime series in June 2009. The Doraemon anime's title character is a time-traveling robot cat from the future, and the "dream matchup" was described in the Japanese press as a confrontation between America and Japan's robots. (The Terminator: Salvation film opened in Japan on June 13, 2009, two weeks before the promotional Doraemon cameo.)
Source: Email correspondence
