Ok, so before I get all into making fun of him for his name, I should mention that McG, the director of the forthcoming Terminator Salvation (which looks quite likely to be as much the salvation of the franchise as of mankind), may have little on his past directing resume other than the Charlie’s Angels movies, We Are Marshall, and some cool music videos (Offspring, Korn, and Sublime), but he is helming a 2011 production of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and is also already talking about Terminator 5.

Terminator Salvation (which, you remember, is rumored to be the first film of a new Terminator trilogy) takes place in 2018 but McG plans to have the fourth sequel take place in the present day (2011), before the events of Salvation. If that’s not confusing enough, according to worstpreviews.com, in Terminator 5, the people of the future have “figured out time travel to the degree where they can send more than one naked entity. So you’re going to have hunter killers and transports and harvesters and everything arriving in our time and Connor fighting back with conventional military warfare, which I think is going to be f#%king awesome.”

Their words, not mine, but I whole-heartedly agree. Generally I feel like it’s best to let movies be released before you start propagating their sequels, but in the case of the Terminators I am willing to grant an exception. Salvation is sure to be a huge hit this summer, and if all goes according to plan, it may very well turn out that Terminator 3 will go down as an embarrassing black sheep in the otherwise uniformly badass Terminator family.

Can I just make a suggestion? If, in fact, McG is already slated to take on directing duties for Terminator 5, I hope that James Cameron understands that if he comes back to the series for Terminator 6 (if there will  actually be such a thing), it will create absolute chaos at the box office. You’re sitting on a gold mine, Cameron!!

Terminator Salvation is set for wide release on May 21, 2009.