Terminator movie seems totally unnecessary, and Terminator Salvation was a powerful argument in favor of just letting the series die. On the other hand, the basic idea of time-traveling cyborgs wreaking havoc and smashing shit up is just full of boundless possibilities for awesome. And the one major change Salvation did to the Terminator universe was to make it more like Transformers. So why not just embrace it, and make a totally crazypants Terminator movie with giant robots, like pretty much only Michael Bay can? John Connor could be a young guy searching to figure out who he is, with his best friend a quirky cyborg trying to protect him from all the other cyborgs.
While doing the promotional rounds for his then-new movie, Terminator Salvation, Christian Bale revealed that he and a "director friend" were in talks to adapt a novel by J.G. Ballard — who Bale actually played as a boy in Steven Spielberg's 1987 movie adaptation of Ballard's autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun. Who that friend was and which one of Ballard's novels Bale was referring to remained a mystery until Brad Anderson revealed earlier this year that he was the director in question and that the novel was Ballard's Concrete Island, the screen adaptation of which would be written by Scott Kosar, completing the Anderson-Bale-Kosar triumvirate behind The Machinist.
Even after Anderson's "reveal," it was unclear whether the project had financial backing or if Bale was actually attached as the lead, but it now appears as if the movie is a "go" as Filmax International recently updated its website to include Concrete Island on its list of movies in production, complete with a teaser poster boasting Bale's name and a plot synopsis.