As a war between humans and AI machines rages, the animated character Eiko, a resistance fighter voiced by Sonoya Mizuno, battles a cyborg assassin from the future in the official trailer for Netflix’s Terminator Zero, which was released on Wednesday.
Eiko has been sent back in time to protect scientist Malcolm Lee, voiced by André Holland, as he develops Kokoro, or an advanced artificial intelligence as a rival to the malicious Skynet.
“If the Terminator can get to Malcolm, the children will be its next target,” Eiko says at one point in the trailer as Skynet’s unrelenting killer robot hunts for Lee and the anime series’ dramatic stakes rise. The Netflix series from The Batman II writer Mattson Tomlin is set to debut on Aug. 29, or “Judgment Day,” and will premiere opposite The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime Video.
The Terminator Zero voice cast includes Timothy Olyphant voicing the Terminator, Rosario Dawson as Kokoro and Ann Dowd as The Prophet, a philosophical guide for the human resistance helping shepherd survivors in the darkness of the unknown future ahead.
According to a synopsis from the producers, Terminator Zero will be set in 2022 where a future war has raged for decades between the few human survivors and an endless army of machines, and 1997 where the AI known as Skynet has gained self-awareness and has begun its war against humanity.
The eight-episode series hails from Japanese animation studio Production IG and is directed by Masashi Kudo. Terminator Zero promises new characters and is the first-ever iteration of the movie franchise to be animated. Tomlin is the showrunner, writer and executive producer on the series, with David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Don Granger executive producing for Skydance.
In 2023, Skydance Animation unveiled a multiyear pact with Netflix to develop and produce animated movies for the streamer.
