After the last two Terminator movies failed both commercially and critically, they have decided to go animated for Terminator Zero. The Netflix animated series now has a trailer ahead of its premiere on August 29th.
The eight-episode series splits its action across 1997, when Skynet first goes online, and 2022 when the war has already been underway for more than 20 years.
A soldier (Sonoya Mizuno) is sent back in time by the resistance leader The Prophet (Ann Dowd) to change the fate of humanity. She arrives in 1997 to protect a scientist named Malcolm Lee (André Holland) who is working to launch Kokoro (Rosario Dawson), a new AI system designed to compete with Skynet.
As Malcolm navigates the moral complexities of his creation, he is hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future which could forever alter the fate of his family.
Deadwood and Justified star Timothy Olyphant is the voice of the Terminator in this series. The showrunner is Mattson Tomlin, with David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Don Granger executive producing. Production IG is handling the animation.
Terminator Zero was first announced in February 2021 with the working title Terminator: The Anime Series as revealed by Netflix in its 2023 Geeked Week presentation.
Tomlin has stated that the series treats all of the prior films as canon, and Production I.G. requested that it have some kind of Japanese component. The decision was to set the story in Japan.