You’d think the rights to Terminator could be bought for cheap considering the last film made $380M and the rights holder, Halcyon, still went bankrupt.  But you’d be wrong.  Because you used logic, classic mistake.  Anyway, as of yesterday, Sony and Lionsgate had teamed up to acquire the rights, with a plan for “a complete re-boot, back to basics, with real emotional stories, and effects that will be secondary.”  Instead…

Sony and Lionsgate dropped out at just under $29.5 million when it became clear that Santa Barbara-based hedge fund Pacificor “was willing to pay almost any amount of money for Terminator.” [DHD]

Part of the reason Halcyon went bankrupt was because they owed this hedge fund Pacificor a bunch of money, and as part of the deal, Pacificor is erasing that debt as well as paying off Halcyon’s other creditors.  No one knows what Pacificor plans to do with the franchise, but if I know anything about finance, it’s that hedges are really expensive to maintain.  Why, obtaining one must be nearly as difficult as finding… a shrubbery! Ni!  Ni! God I’m a dork.

Sony recently submitted a bid for the rights to the Termnator franchise on the final day of bidding.  No word on what their bid was, but one assumes it was higher than Lionsgate’s floor bid of $15 million.  And further that if they’re spending that much on it, that they’ll want to make another Terminator movie.  I did a search for Sony in my old posts to see what kind of Terminator we might expect from them if they got it, and the projects that came up, in order of newest to oldest, were:

- The latest Da Vinci Code movie
- The Spider-Man reboot (because they wouldn’t let Sam Raimi have the villain he wanted)
- The Karate Kid remake starring Will Smith’s son and set in China (where they don’t even have Karate)
- A movie based on the board game Risk
- Men in Black 3.

Doing worse than hiring the guy from Charlie’s Angels won’t be easy, but that list is looking downright Fox-like. Let’s see, we’ve done bad Terminator, good Terminator, molten-metal Terminator, hot-chick Terminator, Terminator with a human heart, Christian Bale-screaming-for-no-reason-at-a-Terminator Terminator… perhaps we’re due for… sassy fat black Terminator in drag?  Dorky Chinese Terminator?  Obviously, I’ve got my fingers crossed for racial stereotypes.   Why for-a you no tell-a Papa where-a Sara Connor?  You mamma slappa you face.

(Least sexy shoe-cam photo ever.)

Terminator Salvation wasn’t the worst movie in the world.  It had some cool action sequences, but it followed them up with Christian Bale yelling for no apparent reason and a final 15 minutes that challenged the last 15 of Indy 4 for dumbest ever.  When I saw it I got so mad I punched the wall and lava came out.  Now Halcyon has filed for bankruptcy and is selling the franchise.  Problem is, no one wants to buy.  But that didn’t stop McG from planning two more movies.  He made the comments during a special event in which people who bought the Blu-ray could listen to live commentary from McG.  Sadly we don’t have the transcript, just a pretty great live blog from Gizmodo.  Poor McG.  He seems like a good guy who’s just a little too stupid for his own good.  He’s like the friend who really wants to be in your band, and you’d totally let him, only he can’t play an instrument and keeps drooling on the tambourine.  Also, he seems strangely cocky.  McG, I mean.

6:55: McG just compared his movie to The Dark Knight.

6:57: Audience question: how do you feel about making the horrible Charlie’s Angels films?

6:57: McG: “I really like those movies. If you don’t like them you can f-ck off.” [He later added, 'You're stupid and ugly and this is all just a defense mechanism.' -Ed]

6:59: “I want feedback from the audience if you want another movie or not?”

7:00: From the comments the director’s making, it seems like McG isn’t really a fan of subtlety. I don’t want to get too negative or anything…but yeah. [Editor's note: think of this as foreshadowing.]

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I don’t usually watch 60 Minutes because I don’t have grey pubes, but yesterday they did a profile on JC, aka Jesus Cameron, director of Avatar and creator of the universe amen.  It’s mostly the same stuff you’ve already heard in his Playboy interview, his New Yorker profile, his letter to Penthouse forum, etc., but there was one tidbit that was new to me:

“The head of Orion, who were gonna release Terminator, called me up and said, ‘Are you sitting down?  I have cast this movie.  I was at a party, and it’s OJ Simpson for the Terminator.’

And I said ‘This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.’

And I didn’t know OJ Simpson, I had nothing against him personally, and I didn’t know he was gonna go murder his wife and become the real Terminator…”

The segment does a pretty good job of capturing Cameron in a nutshell: enough of a megalomaniacal Napoleon to wear a hat that says HMFIC (Head MotherF-cker In Charge) but refreshing in that he’s the rare Hollywood personality that seems very intelligent and has the balls to casually call OJ a murderer in an interview.  In related news, Brett Ratner has a hat that says “Big Cheese” because he loves nachos.

(My mistake, this is actually a Birdemic, not a Robopocalypse, I must’ve gotten the slides mixed up.)

Dreamworks today bought the rights to an unpublished novel called Robopocalypse, which of course is the erotic story of the first lesbian to play in the WNBA.

The angry-robots story line has played out in movies such as the “Terminator” series, “I, Robot” and the two “Transformers” films [wrong, though we would've accepted "The Matrix." -Ed.]
But Daniel H. Wilson, an actual Ph.D. in robotics, has grounded his tale with a heavy degree of authenticity derived from real robot technology.
“Daniel H. Wilson’s cautionary tale of man versus machine grabbed us from the very beginning,” said Dreamworks’ Mark Sourian. “Wilson’s background in robotics and artificial intelligence grounds his story with a frightening level of realism.”
Wilson added: “Writing this novel is an incredible thrill, after spending years studying and thinking about robotics. My hope is that the story we tell will make the robots of the future proud of us humans.” [THR]

Let’s see, so you took the premise of a bunch of other science fiction movies and added more realism and a literal title?  Well, done, man, that’s great.  (*pats Wilson on the back while secretly taping “kick me i’m a huge dork” sign to it*)  Wilson is also known for writing such previous titles as (and I’m not making any of these up): – How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion, Bro-Jitsu: The Martial Art of Sibling Smackdown, - How to Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Aliens, Ninjas, and Zombies and - The Mad Scientist Hall of Fame: Muwahahaha! So congrats to Daniel Wilson, or, as he’s known to friends, “I thought I told you to stop calling here.”