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Interesting development on the Sarah Connor Chronicles front.  Last we heard back in March, Fox has decided to cancel the series.  Which was a shame because it truly rounded into its own during the second and final season. 

Now word comes from Lanie Grace, who’s been following the developments and was the first to break news of its cancellation, that the show might not be cancelled after all. 

I learned that at a minimum there are plans to pickup where TSCC left off and go straight to DVD as a T5 warm up although a relaunched TSCC Series is not out of the works depending on wide variety of things. The goal would be for the series and T5 to form a merge point in a future timeline. The plan is to possibly start production in late 2010 or early 2011. Most of the cast will already be on board due to contract clauses from the orifinal series from what I understood.

Interesting that the plan seems to be to tie the show in with the next feature film installment.  Usually this is never a good idea, but if they can pull it off, then all the power to them. 

In the Official continued TSCC story line, young John Connor will exist for a time in the future and will return to circa 2010 before Sarah succumbs to cancer and J-Day occurs. What piqued the interested of Halcyon and WB were the writer’s uncanny similar evolution of Allison, her relationship with John along with her capture by a Marcus Wright style Terminator and the development of Alex the ever so quiet Latina as an integral part in John’s present and future.  Weaver will also return “full force” as will Ellison, Savannah, Murch, JH and whole new set of characters in the future including Kyle and Derek.

So, it might not be returning as a television show, but it looks good that we will visit the same characters and actors from the show at a later point in time.

FOX won’t announce it for another month or so, but Michael Ausiello at EW confirms a rumor first run by FMQ Inc., that little-watched (on actually realtime television anyways) Terminator: The Sarah Connors Chronicles has been canceled. 

“It’s done,” maintains a source close to the show. “Everyone has pretty much known for a couple of weeks.” Adds a network insider: “Consider it canceled.”

For shame, too.  Though I casually got sucked into Season 1, the show really found it’s footing about five episodes into the second season and grew into one of television’s best shows.  It was legitimate appointment television, even if I was watching it on Hulu Saturday mornings.

Regardless, the show ended it’s second season on a very strong note.   Last week’s finale was as good as they come – a satisfying what-if ending, that will have fans of the terminator mythology debating and theorizing for a while. 

The real question now, however, is what is Summer Glau going to do?

If you’re like me and a terminator junkie, you’ve probably at some point tried to figure out all the different timelines.  Each time the terminators go back to hunt John Connor the future is changed, creating branching futures all related to one another. 

Seems that the nature of time is cyclical in this universe and the only way John Connor is going to change anything is to keep sending things back in time to change the future until there is a desirably outcome. 

Anyway, the awesome geeks over at io9 have been making sense of this and one of their readers sent in the above whiteboard, which lays out pretty clearly what’s going on in the terminator mythology.  Leland Rzepecki writes:

That scribbling at the bottom is from when I realized that time in Terminator must be cyclical, because that’s the only way to explain how Derek and Jessie can be from different futures but be in the same timeline now. The slash in the middle of the line is Judgement Day. Some of that stuff at the bottom was showing my roommate how Derek would have had to skip a timeline using my linear “domino” model, and I couldn’t think of a reason why that would happen.

As for the 12:00, 2:00. I was explaining how we could be seeing both futures in the show. The analogy I was using is that at 12:00 (the clock times are just to make everything relative, if that makes sense) Derek goes back in time, and causes changes to the timeline at 1:00. Then at 2:00, after Derek makes changes like killing Andy Goode, Jessie travels back in time. So even though Jessie came from the same time as Derek, she came later, in more than one way. Does that make sense?

The color coding: Black is pre-Judgement Day stuff I’m sure of, green is Future War stuff I’m sure of, and red is the blurry stuff I can’t really prove, but makes sense to me.

My major is Game Design, and I don’t recommend it, haha. I’ve always been a lot better at “fake” science than real science. I love movies like Primer where you have to keep a lot of timelines straight in your head though, so all of this came pretty naturally to me.

I wanted to wait until the morning after FOX’s two-night premiere to post some thoughts on the much hyped Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Instead of doing a full blown review for you, I’ll just say that I found the show fairly entertaining to watch a few more times before deciding to axe it from my life.

Truth is, however, I wonder if I would have even watched it if not for the writer’s strike. Yes, it’s action-packed in that lame sorta television way. The special effects are certainly better than I expected them to be. But there’s something lacking overall with this whole affair.

Besides the stunted dialog, the very competent cast is just left stranded with what seems to be a show without any heart or grit. We pick up with Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) and her son John (Thomas Dekker), who for those that haven’t seen any of the Terminator movies is supposed to be the savior of the human race, in 1999. They are on the run and trying to survive after the events of Terminator 2.

Strangely though, the show seems to ignore T3 altogether since in that movie Sarah dies of cancer in 1997. Here in the show we learn she dies in 2005. Continuity aside (ok I’ll cop to it this is a huge problem for me as it will be for many fans of the first two movies but it wasn’t a problem for my girlfriend who just wanted to watch a good show), this show offers some pleasure, especially with the new Terminator model sent back to protect John. As played by actress Summer Glau, the new Terminator “Cameron” is both pop culturally awkward and a killing machine. So much so, that the Terminator sent back to kill John Connor is afraid of her on sight. This will probably be one of the show’s central mysteries – to discover what’s up with the new model.

On the whole, this show is far from perfect and probably would have benefited from being on HBO or Showtime, there’s that much potential.

One caveat: in the movies Sarah Connor, as played by Linda Hamilton, is a stone cold bitch. She’s a warrior and a survivor. In fact, I think I was more scared of Sarah in T2 than I was of the liquid metal T-1000. For whatever reason, in this show, they’ve neutered her character. She’s neither warrior nor survivor. Instead she’s like a desperate soccer mom on the lamb in a bad Lifetime movie. I’m not sure why they’ve made the change but it certainly wasn’t for the better. Sarah Connor, as a character, is only motivated by protecting her son at all costs. That’s it and for whatever reason, the producers here have either ignored that or forgotten it all together.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on FOX

Devin over at Chud has confirmed with several of his sources and ironed out some wrinkles regarding the upcoming Terminator trilogy.  Producers are planning movies numbered 4, 5, 6 in the series made famous by James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This time around director McG (Charlie’s Angels, We Are Marshall) is stepping in to helm the first movie in the planned second trilogy.  Everything seemed like a joke until producers landed a casting coup convincing Christian Bale to play the part of humanity’s savior John Connor.

And now we sort of know what happens in the film.  Despite producers claims that John Connor will have a large role in the fourth movie, tentatively titled Terminator Salvation: Fight the Future, that is not the case.  His role will be expanded for movies number 5 and 6.

John Connor is not the main character of Terminator 4; that character is someone named Marcus. Marcus was put ‘out of commission’ before the nuclear holocaust on Judgment Day and he wakes up about 15 years before the future we see in the original Terminator films, which puts the movie at about 2015 or so. Marcus is a bad ass – think along the lines of Riddick – and what he finds is a blasted world filled with horror. Radiation poisoning, starvation, rampant jaywalking – all the things you expect post-apocalypse. There’s also John Connor, who is trying to build a utopian society while running the human resistance.

Connor’s role is apparently bigger in the second film; whoever they hire for Marcus (my understanding is that the part is not yet cast) will be around for all three films. Terminator 4 is going to be the most male-centric of all the Terminator films, but there is a butt busting female character by the name of Blair, a pilot for the human resistance.

They’re going to need some buttkickers, because the scope of the action in Terminator 4 is HUGE. Lots of machine action in this film, including some battles with the T-600s. Yup, the rubber skin Terminators. And there’s another familiar character that shows up – Reese shows up in a scene with John Connor. I don’t know what his involvement in the next two films will be, though.

Sounds like maybe this new Terminator franchise won’t suck, but I won’t hold my breath.  Though it certainly won’t be difficult to top T3: Rise of the Machines.  That movie was just awful.

Christian Bale has reportedly been offered a part in director McG’s upcoming take on the Terminator franchise, Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins. According to both AICN’s Harry Knowles and CHUD’s Devin Faraci, the stoic actor has signed onto the franchise, in all likelyhood to cash a movie star payday.

Both articles hint that Bale isn’t making the kind of money he’d like to be making, even in the wake of his success as Batman. What both articles don’t make clear is just what role Bale will be playing in the new movie. AICN insists that Bale is going to be none other than humanity’s salvation in John Connor.

We know Bale takes his shit seriously. And if you saw 3:10 TO YUMA… just imagine him coming out of his mountain and beginning the process of taking out SKYNET. With Bale as Connor – that means that we have a great chance that McG is pulling a chair up and will deliver. It all depends on that script… it is obvious we’re dealing now with an adult, GREAT MILITARY LEADER storyline … How he got the remnants of civilization together, trained them, armed them and began a guerilla war that eventually, we hope, brings down SKYNET.

While CHUD claims Bale will be putting on the endoskeletal and playing a terminator.

The interesting thing is that he got it a little different from what I got – my source had him AS The Terminator, while Harry has him as John Connor.

Either way, Bale’s latest string of roles makes him seem almost perfect for either role. His presence certainly ups the credibility of this movie and makes this project go from “straight to DVD” to something to keep an eye on. We’ll have to wait for official word from the studio or the trade papers, but this seems much more than mere rumor.

Lotsa stuff to get to this morning and rather than try to do each of these by giving them the space to breath, we’re gonna smash them into one extended post and hope we hit everything. Today’s my birthday and per tradition that started in college I take the day off to celebrate me, which usually ends up in me getting drunk at noon and watching bloody disgusting movies that no one else will watch with me. I’m thinking about doing a Hostel Part 2 and 28 Weeks Later movie marathon.

So I’ll be shutting things down after leaving you with some good stuff today. We’ve got two movies reviews from the NW Film Fest to get up and a music premiere that I think you won’t enjoy, but you should find endearing.

I’d also like to give a warm happy birthday greeting to Dwight Gooden and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

On with the news:

- Kevin Smith is getting his inner Judd Apatow on. He’s cast Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks as the leads in his upcoming flick Zack and Miri Make a Porno. It’ll be nice to see some fresh faces from one comedy universe transplanted to another one.

- Tim Burton returns to Disney to direct a motion-captured version of Alice in Wonderland! Really would you want any other director doing this. He’s also going to direct a feature length version of Frankenweenie. All I can say is Johnny Depp for the Mad Hatter…

- MTV has footage from the upcoming DVD of Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix.

- Speaking of Harry Potter, Worst Previews has a behind the scenes video of the now-filming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. They’re just cranking these badboys out aren’t they?

- Hulk get angry and smash pretty girls! Just kidding, but the first trailer for the Eric Bana, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson starring The Other Boleyn Girls has arrived.

- Guud, director McG has been locked into to direct the fourth Terminator flick: Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins.  Which was going to be called “Straight To Video” in its original draft.

- Speaking of cool trailers, did you like that transition?  How does this sound: Jackie Chan and Jet Li kick some ass in a martial arts picture titled The Forbidden Kingdom.  

- The latest Cloverfield trailer has been pirated by a camera cellphone.  It’s not difficult to find on YouTube, but we seriously recommend you waiting for the non-pirated version when it hits either today or Monday.

- Jeff Bridges hints there may be a sequel in the works to everyone’s favorite movie growing up: Tron.  

- Persepolis is an animated movie from France about the Iranian revolution and it’s in subtitles and it looks like American animation from 1935 but if you can get past all of that it also looks frakking awesome.