It was only a few months ago that it was revealed Fast & Furious helmer Justin Line was attached to helmer a fifth Terminator movie, with Arnie also ready to jump back into the franchise. However there are already problems, as Terminator rights owner Megan Ellison (who purchased the franchise for $20 million earlier this year) and Arnold Schwarzenegger and keen to shoot Terminator 5 in fourth quarter of 2012, which has forced director Justin Lin to drop out. He’s already committed to making Fast & Furious 6 around that time, and so won’t be available.
However, Deadline reports that while Lin is currently out of the directing chair, he hopes to return if Megan Ellison and Arnold Schwarzenegger will wait until he completes Fast & Furious 6. That may be possible, as currently the film has no script or indeed much else, so it might not be ready to film at the end of next year.
That said, Ellison does have constraints, as her $20 million investment has a bit of a time limit on it. In American copyright law, if the original creator assigns their rights to another party, they get them back in 35 years, which means James Cameron will own the US rights to Terminator from 2018 onwards. Ellison is keen to get at least two movies made by then (the plan was to have both directed by Lin), so she can be certain of getting her cash back. While she might be able to do a deal with Cameron after 2018, things would get rather tricky. That means she’ll want to get T5 in the can as soon as she can, and currently that means finding someone to replace Lin, at least for the first of the planned movies. However if development stalls for any reason, he may well be back.