‘Terminator Zero’ Showrunner Mattson Tomlin Reveals the Return of Skynet

This article was written for the September/October '24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 343).

One of the great unsolved mysteries of the universe is why it has taken four decades for Terminator fans to finally get an animated adaptation of that nightmarish world, first introduced by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd in the 1984 sci-fi blockbuster. But for indie filmmaker Mattson Tomlin, the visionary writer and showrunner behind Netflix’s new Terminator Zero anime series, that conundrum is far less a glimpse in the rearview mirror than a reason for gratitude that the project entered his own creative sphere.

“Why they haven’t done this up until this moment, I have no idea,” he tells Animation Magazine. “But I’m glad they waited until it could be me. The call for Terminator was an incoming call, which doesn’t always happen. I got on somebody’s list and it just worked out. I was on set shooting another robot apocalypse film that I directed, Mother/Android. I got an email that said Skydance and Netflix were pairing with Production I.G and they’re going to make a Terminator show and would I be interested.”

‘I realized we’ve seen Judgment Day in flashbacks, flash-forwards and dreams, but we’ve never seen it. So just set it in 1997 and then let it play.’

— Showrunner/exec producer Mattson Tomlin

Manifesting the moody metropolis of Gotham City and its tormented caped crusader as co-screenwriter for director Matt Reeves’ The Batman, Tomlin fortified his storytelling talents to tackle writing this first-ever animated adaptation of The Terminator.

Netflix’s eight-chapter Terminator Zero is directed by anime master Masashi Kudō (Bleach) and centers on dueling 1997 and 2022 timelines. As Judgment Day (Aug. 29, 1997) looms, genius scientist Malcolm Lee is fine-tuning his savior AI called Kokoro to deploy in a frightening war against Cyberdyne Systems’ mainframe known as Skynet. A fearless female freedom fighter called Eiko is launched back in time from 2022 to 1997 to guard Lee from a stalking T-800 Terminator robot aiming to kill Lee and his supercomputer threat.

Revisiting Judgment Day

Terminator Zero is also blessed with a vocal dream team including Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood, Justified) as the Terminator, Rosario Dawson (Ahsoka) as Kokoro, André Holland (Moonlight) as Malcolm Lee, Sonoya Mizuno (House of the Dragon) as Eiko and Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale) playing the Prophet.

“The fact that the show was animated and there were Japanese creative partners, it seemed like an opportunity to set the whole thing in Japan,” Tomlin explains. “And that was a chance to get away from the U.S.-Mexico border, which is where all Terminator movies have taken place. Instantly, that set it on new ground. I realized we’ve seen Judgment Day in flashbacks, flash-forwards and dreams, but we’ve never seen it. So just set it in 1997 and then let it play.”

In a fitting example of fate 25 years in the making, Tomlin first saw director James Cameron’s The Terminator when he was eight, and it had a haunting effect that he’d draw upon when crafting the horror-tinted scripts that formed the bulk of Terminator Zero.

“I rented it on VHS from my local library and it just scared the s— out of me,” he recalls. “I think I got as far as the scene where the Terminator starts to take out his own eye. I was just like, ‘I can’t, I can’t.’ It gave me nightmares, and a couple of years later I was 11 or 12 and The Matrix came out and I was obsessed with it. So I went on this run of looking for all the great sci-fi movies and I saw Terminator 2 and it blew my mind.”

For fans of the original Terminator, one of the more iconic images composed by Cameron and cinematographer Adam Greenberg was when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding buddy Franco Columbu was revealed, playing a T-800 unit infiltrating a resistance bunker and his red eyes glowing as he opened fire with his particle cannon. These types of threads were part of the visual language Tomlin tried to convey to his veteran animation team at Production I.G.

“When I was writing the script, I was putting together these visual ‘look books’ for every single scene,” Tomlin adds. “I wanted to arm Production I.G with as much as possible, and that image was in so many of the scenes. I remember pointing to it and saying, ‘We’ve got to get to that!’”

Choosing character designs for Terminator Zero presented slight obstacles in development because Tomlin wanted to steer clear of the muscle-bound look in Schwarzenegger’s portrayal.

“It’s such a mind f—, because when you say Terminator, you think Arnold,” he says. “When Cameron started talking about The Terminator in Rome, where he had the fever dream about a machine skeleton, it was Lance Henriksen he was going to cast. He has quotes I found of him talking about him being the ultimate infiltrator. That’s the opposite of Schwarzenegger.

“The thing I kept saying was that he needs to be somebody that if you saw him in a dark alley, you’d want to turn the other way. He’s sort of lanky, he looks pale and kind of sweaty, he’s a little bit cross-eyed. I started calling him the creepy fish man. There are going to be some people who look at him and get annoyed because he’s not the definition of cool.”

Terminator Zero’s intense saturated colors, noir anime style and old-school violence were aesthetic choices Tomlin stressed to Kudō and the I.G animators.

“What’s great about Production I.G as partners is that they’re so good at what they do, that at a certain level it’s like, ‘I can arm you with all the material and now it’s my job to just get out of your way and let you guys do what you do.’ For any character, they would send me 25 iterations or so. I.G was so incredibly kind to me in letting me be involved in that process.”

Another touchstone essential to the success of Tomlin’s Terminator series was aligning with composer Brad Fiedel’s pulsating synthesizer score for The Terminator. Terminator Zero delivers an enveloping soundscape that anchors fans while harkening back to that 1984 score.

“My friends Kevin Henthorn and Michelle Birsky, who did the score for my movie Mother/Android also did the score for this. They heard that I’d gotten Terminator and so they just started sending me music. A lot of that kind of synthy, dark stuff — I was writing to that. That really helped the tone. They were on before they were officially on, giving me that palette to write to.”

Having a competent vocal cast for any animated endeavor is a critical aspect, and Tomlin never overlooked that.

“Terminators are not the most verbal characters. I think Arnold in T2 has like 60 lines, and there’s a similar ratio here. The Terminator speaks, but it takes him a minute. They all bring such an amazing soulful quality to it. Even adding little externalizations brings the character so much to life. They were all my No. 1 choice. With Rosario, it doesn’t get any better. I’ve quietly had a crush on her since I was 15 years old when Sin City came out.”

Finally, the most rewarding part of Tomlin’s Terminator Zero project hopefully has yet to come.

“I hope the hardcore fans, who really love Terminator, feel rewarded,” he concludes. “Going through the process of four years, writing all the episodes, overseeing it and making sure it stays on the rails, I’m very proud of what this show is and how it’s turned out. And the fact that it’s Terminator, it’s very high stakes. I made the thing I wanted to make, and you can’t beat that.”

Terminator Zero premieres on Netflix on Thursday, August 29.