http://chud.com/nextraimages/terminatorskeleton.jpgIt’s a big day for scoops from trusted and reliable sources. The latest comes from Duckie, who has been hearing buzzing about a name that is sort of attached to direct Terminator 4: McG.

This doesn’t mean McG IS directing Terminator 4, but that he’s in talks about it. The film is being set up as a pre-striker; the script just got turned in last week and the good people at The Halcyon Company would like to get this sucker into pre-production stat. Some talk had the movie shooting in the summer of 2008, but that’s right when the strike would start, so expect this bitch to be going before the cameras in the first months of the new year.

Terminator 4 is really the movie we’ve been waiting for and that Terminator 3 failed to deliver: it’s after the apocalypse and John Connor is organizing the surviving humans to resist Skynet’s army of robots. I imagine this would be the Terminator origin story – the first time a human looking robot is used to infiltrate the ranks of people. There’s something delightfully Planet of the Apes about taking the series into its own backstory like this.

Of course the question is: is McG right for the film? I don’t have a huge problem with it – the guy can aim his camera and capture images; We Are Marshall showed that he doesn’t have to do everything in MTV style. And frankly, Terminator 3 was such a bad case of holding pattern blues that I think this series has burned off any prestige it once had. Who expects a Terminator 4 to be a GREAT movie? I’m willing to settle for an awful lot of fun. McG can do that.