Megan Ellison Lands 'Terminator' Rights

Briefly: And things get interesting. Megan Ellison's company Annapurna Pictures has won the auction for rights to make future films in the Terminator franchise, beating out LionsGate and becoming the producers behind Justin Lin and Arnold Schwarzenegger's potential Terminator sequel.Deadline says the company now has rights to make "at least two more" films in the series. We don't have much more detail now, and I'll refer you back to the thoughts put down two days ago when this outcome started to seem like a real possibility. In short, we're now looking at a new Terminator film from the same person who is financing some ambitious and very promising indie prestige pictures like The Wettest County in the World, Paul Thomas Anderson's new film, Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmasters, and Kathryn Bigelow's tentatively-titled Kill Bin Laden. This is a better outcome than having the rights land at a studio — The Terminator has always been an independently-owned series — and a development that augers well for the new film. I still think this series is close to being out of gas, but if the same person who wants to make all those movies I just listed also wants to make Terminator 5, I'm curious to see what happens.