Why Netflix Canceled Terminator Zero

"Terminator Zero" debuted on Netflix in August 2024, and it immediately established itself as one of the better installments within the "Terminator" franchise. It's not a particularly high bar to climb given the quality of most of the sequels, but it was well-received, currently standing with an 87% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes. With that kind of praise, fans have waited patiently for an update on when they can see the next chapter drop on the streaming platform — but now we know it's as dead as a T-800 getting lowered into a vat of molten steel.

The show's creator, Mattson Tomlin, revealed on X why Netflix canceled "Terminator Zero" when a fan asked for an update on Season 2. "It was cancelled," he wrote. "The critical and audience reception to it was tremendous, but at the end of the day not nearly enough people watched it. I would've loved to deliver on the Future War I had planned in season's 2 and 3, but I'm also very happy with how it feels contained as is." Tomlin added that the show was very expensive to make, so it needed a big audience to justify more episodes.

Fans might be even more crushed to hear that technically more "Terminator Zero" could have materialized, as Tomlin continued, "I'll also say [Netflix] offered to let me do 2, maybe 3 episodes more to wrap up the story, which I declined. I felt the story I wanted to tell was much longer, and the finale of season one actually left things in a good place." It's disappointing, but hopefully, James Cameron will usher in a new era of the "Terminator" franchise shortly.

"Terminator Zero" had a lot of interesting ideas that might have been explored later in the series or perhaps even in the live-action films. The introduction of a new AI entity, Kokoro (Rosario Dawson), could have changed everything about "Terminator 2." The franchise has always been about rogue artificial intelligence threatening humanity, and with AI making headlines every day, it seems like the perfect time for the "Terminator" franchise to be revived and potentially relevant again.

It turns out that James Cameron, who directed and co-wrote the first two "Terminator" movies, has plans to return to the series he birthed. Speaking with iO9, Cameron revealed, "I've got a stack of notes this thick [holds fingers about three inches apart], which is how I start all my scripts, on what I want to do with a new 'Terminator' film. I'm going to pour myself into that as a writer." With the continued success of the "Avatar" franchise as well as plans to make a movie about the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Cameron will likely be too busy to direct a "Terminator" film himself. But he might have a hand in crafting the story, which will hopefully get casual fans interested again.

The last live-action film, 2019's "Terminator: Dark Fate," bombed at the box office, making $261 million against a $185 million budget. Between that and the cancellation of the well-received "Terminator Zero," it might seem like people are tuning out of "Terminator." Hopefully, there's still time for the series' future to get rewritten before it goes extinct.