With Avatar: Fire and Ash hitting theaters this weekend, James Cameron is already looking ahead to his other blockbuster legacy franchise: The Terminator.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Cameron says that once his current Avatar press obligations wind down, he plans to fully refocus on the future of humanity’s war against the machines.

“Once the dust clears on Avatar in a couple of months, I’m going to really plunge into that,” Cameron explains. “There are a lot of narrative problems to solve. The biggest is, how do I stay enough ahead of what’s really happening to make it science fiction?”

One major shift Cameron confirms is that Terminator 7 will move forward without Arnold Schwarzenegger, marking the first mainline installment overseen by Cameron that excludes the franchise’s most iconic face.

“I can safely say he won’t be [in it],” Cameron says. “It’s time for a new generation of characters. I insisted Arnold had to be involved in Terminator: Dark Fate, and it was a great finish to him playing the T-800.”

According to Cameron, the future of The Terminator lies in expanding its core ideas rather than repeating familiar beats.

“There needs to be a broader interpretation of Terminator and the idea of a time war and super intelligence,” he says. “I want to do new stuff that people aren’t imagining.”

That philosophy extends to Cameron’s creative mindset as a whole, emphasizing risk over nostalgia.

“The things that scare you the most are exactly the things you should be doing,” Cameron adds. “Nobody should be operating artistically from a comfort zone.”

Schwarzenegger famously starred in Cameron’s 1984 The Terminator as a relentless cybernetic assassin sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor, a role he reprised in 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Cameron stepped away from directing duties after T2, as the franchise continued with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Terminator Salvation (2009), Terminator Genisys (2015), and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019).

Salvation remains the only entry in the series to date that did not feature Schwarzenegger in any form.