Terminator Zero Teaser Trailer: Judgement Day and Anime Collide

Netflix has released the first teaser trailer for Terminator Zero, an anime that combines James Cameron's post-apocalyptic universe with gratuitous violence only this medium can gleefully showcase. The eight-episode series premieres later this year.

Written by Mother/Android and The Batman scribe Mattson Tomlin, the series stars Timothy Olyphant as the titular Terminator , Rosario Dawson, Sonoya Mizuno, André Holland, and Ann Dowd. The show is directed by Masashi Kudo, who has also worked as a character designer in the popular anime series Bleach.

Terminator Zero Teaser Trailer

“I was looking at the franchise and the first two movies in particular,” Tomlin said in a Netflix Tudum blog post . “And why are we still talking about this franchise 40 years later? You strip away killer robots, you strip away Judgment Day, what do you have left? You have stories about families.”

The anime may be a part of the Terminator universe, but it will tell a completely new story with characters we haven't met in the films. For a starter, it will show us Japan's actions against Skynet, which include a new AI called Kokoro (Dawson).

Netflix has released the official synopsis for the anime:

2022: A future war has raged for decades between the few human survivors and an endless army of machines. 1997: The AI known as Skynet gained self-awareness and began its war against humanity.

Caught between the future and this past is a soldier sent back in time to change the fate of humanity. She arrives in 1997 to protect a scientist named Malcolm Lee who works to launch a new AI system designed to compete with Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. As Malcolm navigates the moral complexities of his creation, he is hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future which forever alters the fate of his three children.

Terminator Zero releases on August 29, 2024, on Netflix.