Terminator Franchise Being Auctioned Off
Mon, November 2, 2009 
It’s not exactly breaking news that the Terminator rights are up for sale. Various reports (including ours) detailed about it a few months back including rumors that the Governator himself was being sought after for a buy-in with another company. That apparently didn’t work out (or it was just a bullshit Internet rumor).
Now Financial Times reports that franchise rights (which are for film and television related projects, but does not include the previous four movies or The Sarah Connor Chronicles) will be put up for auction later this month. A number of big studios (including Sony who distributed Terminator: Salvation to the international markets) are said to be keeping an eye on it.
Not one to be just a one-franchise studio (like MGM with James Bond), Summit Entertainment is also said to be interested. They’re the folks who turned Twilight from book phenomenon for emo tweens to a top-tier franchise.
For me (and presumably many of you good folks out there), the question is who wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars behind a franchise that just attempted to revive itself to very indifferent results this past summer. Regardless of whether or not you liked McG’s “franchise revival” Terminator: Salvation, doesn’t its box-office underperformance (mixed with the failure of the Sarah Connor series) prove audiences don’t care about this series anymore? It seems like a waste of time and money to me.
Reader Comments (2)
I hope whoever buys it puts it on ice for atleast 10 years.
The Terminator characters are iconic and part of pop culture. The fact that Salvation was a flop was due to a bad screenplay, bad production design (misrepresenting the Cameron canon) and the worst working Hollywood director other than Brett Ratner. The show was essentially a (sometimes interesting) soap opera with some very clumsy fx. But the first two movies remain, as does a bevy of interesting merchandise, such as at least two solid videogames. There are several comic books as well. It's totally worth the money and it will be picked up, common sense dictates that they simply want to get a good deal for it.