“Terminator Zero” will not be back, after all.
The Netflix animated series set in the “Terminator” universe has been canceled after one season, TVLine has confirmed.
Series creator Mattson Tomlin broke the news on X Friday, when asked by a user about the status of the show.
“It was cancelled. The critical and audience reception to it was tremendous, but at the end of the day not nearly enough people watched it,” Tomlin wrote. “I would’ve loved to deliver on the Future War I had planned in season’s [sic] 2 and 3, but I’m also very happy with how it feels contained as is.
“Netflix was really great about supporting the show and giving me tremendous creative freedom to do what I wanted to do. Good partners,” he continued in later posts. “The show was expensive and very time consuming. The only way they could justify it was if the audience showed up for it, and they just didn’t. … 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. But they didn’t have to offer that. Good partners here.”
Tomlin’s announcement of the cancellation comes nearly 18 months after the first and only “Terminator Zero” season was released on August 29, 2024.
In the year 2022, according to the show’s official logline, “a future war has raged for decades between the few human survivors and an endless army of machines,” while back in 1997, “the AI known as Skynet gained self-awareness and began its war against humanity.”
When a soldier caught between the future and past is sent back in time to change the fate of humanity, she arrives to protect a scientist named Malcolm Lee, who is working on a new AI system designed to compete with Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. “As Malcolm navigates the moral complexities of his creation,” the synopsis continues, “he is hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future which forever alters the fate of his three children.”
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