“Terminator Salvation” director/ thrill junkie enthusiast McG has been hinting for months that original “Terminator” star Arnold Schwarzenneger would appear in the fourth installment of the sci-fi action franchise. But at this weekend’s New York Comic Con on Saturday the filmmaker basically let the cat out of the bag and revealed, that today’s Ahnuld, the Govenor of California, won’t appear in the film. Asked point blank, would Schwarzenneger appear? He responded via a longwinded technical response.
“The T800s as we know them look like Arnold [Schwarzenneger]. The T800 plays a big role in this movie.. I can’t quite tell you how we express that, but I will tell you the following: I think when you make a Terminator movie the responsibility of our team…is to push special effects forward. So what we’re trying to do is create visual effects and write code that’s never been written before to address this very question. It is not clear if we will be successful or not, so we’re working very diligently on going up to ILM in Sn Francisco because soon to address this very nature because… let me just hint at this: I don’t want today’s Arnold Schawzenneger. Cheers [to him], but I just want idealized Griffith park, Bill Paxton, tire-track on a face on-the-face archetype, and we’ll see what we can do about that.”
In other words, you’ll probably see his old school face digitally repurposed, but don’t expect the 61-year-old politician to appear as we know him today. Purists will probably be offended, but do you really want, neo-con Arnold in this thing? We would hope not.