Arnold to star in T5

My sources in Hollywood tell me that, after secret negotiations, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has agreed to star in “Terminator 5: The Governator.” Filming will start the day after he leaves office a year from now. He was reluctant to return to the roll that made him famous, but “he really took a bath in the real estate crash,” one source said, and this is his way to make it up.

Arnold’s fee will be based on 10% of worldwide gross, which is expected to be “at least $1.5 billion,” meaning he would get at least $150 million. The price tag of “Terminator 5” is expected to top $500 million, making it the most expensive movie ever made. The producers are courting James Cameron, creater of the series, to direct, now that he has finished his “Avatar” project.

The script is still being worked on. But it begins in the future, where the Skynet computer system runs everything and is close to exterminating the few remaining humans. Its attempts to change the past by sending back killer terminators (T1, T2, T3 and the TV series) have been foiled by the feisty humans, led by Sarah Conner and her delinquent son, John.

But Skynet learns. In T5, Arnold again plays a “bad” terminator, as in T1. (In T2 and T3, he played a “good” Terminator who helped humans.) In T5, Arnold still has the same super-strong, mechanical endoskeleton. But over that is placed an exterior made of cloned human flesh. In the previous films, this flesh was made to look like a bodybuilder — a dead giveaway to the humans.

In T5, Skynet gets smart and provides the Terminator with a more common human appearance, that of a middle-aged, middle-European male nearing retirement.

The Terminator’s mission: to be elected governor of the world’s most prosperous and innovative state, California, and cripple its economy permanently by introducing vast new taxes, waste and regulations. That way, the humans, in the near future, will never be able to devise ways to beat Skynet.

In the current script, which is subject to revision, T5 ends with 38 million Californians rushing madly out of the state, with traffic jams causing millions of deaths and the whole state burning to the ground. The Terminator, his flesh burned to a crisp but his metallic endoskeleton intact, laughs heartily from next to the burning “HOLLYWOOD” sign as he lights a celebratory cigar.

But from the ashes rises John Connor, and the final battle between him and his mechanical nemesis ends with Connor driving the Terminator out of California to New York, where he becomes Secretary General of the United Nations.

– John Seiler