You can crush the Terminator franchise under industrial machinery or lower it into liquid steel, but like the titular figure, this series keeps doggedly crawling along.

According to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the fifth installment will being production early next year with the former California Governor playing a Terminator once again, three decades after bringing the T-800 to menacing life.

Just this week we heard straight from Arnold Schwarzenegger himself that he's still on board to play the T-800 again in the planned Terminator 5.  He's also hoping to launch Triplets, a sequel to Twins that will add Eddie Murphy to the genetic soup with he and Danny DeVito.  Before he gets to either of those, though, Schwarzenegger is set to reprise his role as Hyboria's most dangerous barbarian in The Legend of Conan.

Both the star and producer Fredrick Malmberg have offered their thoughts on very different aspects of the project, with the erstwhile California Governor addressing his age and Malmberg expressing his desire to get the Weta Workshop involved.

The fifth Terminator movie is slowly but surely chugging along.  Contrary to recent belief, it turns out that Terminator 5 won't have to use a digital Arnold Schwarzenegger like Terminator: Salvation, since the former bodybuilder and two-term California Governor will indeed play the T-800 again.

The next installment in the unkillable Terminator franchise has recruited a new pair of writers.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a movie star. 

Actors disappear into their characters and the world of their films.  Riding their charisma, movie stars dictate both and are, to a certain extent, themselves onscreen.  The almost eight years Schwarzenegger spent as the improbable Governor of California meant that he was limited exclusively to brief cameo roles, but now that his gubernatorial tenure is over and he's kept his head low after a public scandal, Arnold Schwarzenegger is once again properly starring in action movies.

In The Last Stand, Schwarzenegger plays a small town sheriff who wrangles the town's eccentrics to stop a wanted drug lord from making it to the U.S./Mexico border.  IAR's Jami Philbrick participated in the movie's press conference, and we'll have plenty more The Last Stand goodies coming your way closer to its January 18th release.  Today, we're looking further into the future.  While promoting his first cinematic vehicle since Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Schwarzenegger shed some light on his new Conan adventure, the Twins sequel Triplets, and even the possibility of teaming up with fellow muscle-mountain Dwayne Johnson.

Now that he's finished up his gubernatorial politics vanity project and somehow weathered that whole illegitimate child dust-up, Arnold Schwarzenegger is ready to once again star in action movies where no effort is made to hide his thick Austrian accent.  These include taking his old successes out of mothballs.  While Terminator 5 isn't making any progress at the moment, Schwarzenegger will be returning to another iconic series with The Legend of Conan.

Despite dormancy of more than a decade following Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the franchise launched by James Cameron in 1984 has, like the titular figure, proven surprisingly resilient, extending its life to two Cameron-less theatrical installments and a television series.  Even after McG's Terminator: Salvation was not terribly well-received in 2009, a fifth Terminator is all but inevitable.  Arnold Schwarzenegger is rather improbably attached to return to series, but director Justin Lin, who became a hugely in-demand commodity with Fast Five this summer, will no longer be involved.  Probably.

With the success of Fast Five, director Justin Lin is now a goose, and all Hollywood awaits the laying of his next golden egg.  His third consecutive installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise has grossed over $600 million internationally since it's April debut, and Lin's sure hand with crowd-pleasing action has made him one of the most sought-after directors in the studio system.  Universal Pictures, the studio behind the Fast franchise, and Lin are apparently looking to continue their fruitful relationship, as the director has signed a two-year production deal to develop two more films with Universal.

As Sean Connery so famously uttered in 1986's Highlander, "In the end, there can only be one."  That sentiment was endlessly repeated through an improbable franchise of four sequels and at least two television series, and it will surely be said several more times in Summit Entertainment's planned Highlander remake.  And there can only be one remake director.  While the remake will almost certainly proceed to production, but it won't do so under the direction of in-demand action-orchestrator Justin Lin.

When The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift  was on the way back in 2006, it was generally viewed as the sad death rattle of an overextended novelty franchise.  Thanks to the confident direction and action orchestration of Justin Lin, though, the stand-alone story proved that there was some life left in the street-racing series, and after bringing back the original cast with Fast & Furious, Lin ensured that this summer's Fast Five was the biggest film of the franchise, earning over $600 million worldwide.  He's been quite enthusiastic about returning for another round of automotive mayhem, and today Lin confirmed that a sixth The Fast and the Furious would be his next film, while also providing an update on the Terminator sequel to which he remains attached.