Mattson Tomlinhas had several busy years, from writing comic books to being a writer/director for television and film, with his newest hot project beingTerminator Zero.It’s a challenging series and a surprise to bring to anime viewers, yet Tomlin’s unique spin on the franchise dives back into its roots while exploring its world just before Judgment Day in 1997, in Japan. With touches of horror inspired by the firstTerminatorfilm, Mattson Tomlin talks about his fundamental reactions and experiences with the series, and how he can transfer that to anime viewers and longtimeTerminatorfans.
Tomlin’s work isn’t slowing down even past the Netflix streaming release ofTerminator Zeroon July 18, 2025, especially with recent news abouthis work on the live-actionBRZRKRadaptationand the comics. With his other recent projects leaving imprints on franchises likeBatmanand adaptations of work by James Tynion IV, Eryk Donovan, Matt Kindt, Ron Garney, and many more,Tomlin channels what readers and viewers crave from beloved franchises.Mattson Tomlin recently gave us a brief interview with Screen Rant before hisTerminator Zeropanel at Anime NYC.
What is your experience with the Terminator as a franchise?
Mattson: The first thing I saw in Terminator was the first movie. I was eight years old, I rented it on VHS from the local library, and it scared me. I got just about as far as Arnold in the hotel room, taking his eye out with a screwdriver. It was too much for an eight-year-old me, so I returned it, and had nightmares.
When I got a bit older, like 12-13, I discovered T2, went back and watched T1, and loved those movies as a kid. I’ve seen all the movies in the theaters, and I’ve really enjoyed the franchise’s highs and lows. But when I got the call to do the show for Terminator, I thought, “What does that mean to me?”
I think the franchise got so eclipsed by the fact that T2 is one of the greatest action films of all time, that we forget the first movie was kind of a horror movie. Because it scared the shit out of me, I wanted to go back to those roots, that was my way of doing this.
How is running an anime adaptation versus a Western series?
Mattson: It’s a weirdly more luxurious process, because it’s slow. You have a lot of time. For me in writing season 1, for months, I was kind of alone, I wrote all of those (eight) episodes, and I was able to do that completely in a vacuum, nobody asking me, “Where is it?” You’re not in that situation where you’ve started to shoot and then have to finish writing those episodes while you’re shooting. I just sat down, I wrote it, and once I got to the end of episode 8, I went back and revised all of them, and then okay, there was this tome of ~250 pages.
Then the process of working with Production I.G, seeing it come to life from the animatic all the way to the finished product took three years. You have all the time to look at the direction it’s going, and to see all the iterations, take notes, and realize it’s a slow burn until it’s done, as opposed to live-action where you’re mounting production, you’re shooting, you’re on the clock, and you either get it or you don’t.
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It’s exciting that you get to cover something Western-inspired while exploring an increasingly saturated medium and audience.
Mattson: It’s cool, and it’s also, as a writer there’s a kind of audience math in going, “There are Terminator fans out there. They know Terminator normally is to be a live-action, $100 million movie. That’s what they expect. Then you have anime fans who may not care about Terminator, and expect anime to register certain notes and have a certain feel for it. These two things haven’t been in dialog with each other. For me, there’s a process of going, “I’ve got to watch the Terminator movies, absorbing why people come back to this franchise.” But I also have to ensure that anime fans not introduced to Terminator could come in see it as a gateway drug into going back to the movies as well.
When it comes to bringing the characters to life and writing them to life, you have a lot of time to flesh them out. What is the experience of writing a Terminator? Is it a different challenge in terms of emotion?
Mattson: There’s a kind of efficiency they have to have. You look at Terminator 2, and whatever Arnold Schwarzenegger got paid for that movie, he has something like ~67 lines of dialogue in the movie, breaking it down to however many words, being paid immensely per word. The Terminator character isn’t the most verbose. If the character isn’t going to say very much, then we really have to think about, “What’s the silhouette?” People expect on some level, Arnold, and I went back to the special features and interviews Cameron was doing while working on the Terminator.
It’s not hidden knowledge, but the original conception for the Terminator was that he was much more of an infiltrator with Lance Henriksen cast as the Terminator. Then Arnold comes in, and that’s not a guy who is going to blend in.
I can still honor the intentions of Cameron in his films and cut from the cloth that he’s weaving, but also to do something that we haven’t really seen before. The design for the Terminator was very much around us not wanting a 350-pound bodybuilder, something that would blend in instead. Also, because of the horror shades of the show, we wanted him to feel creepy, somebody you don’t want to meet in a dark alley. It’s very different from “guy in a leather jacket on a motorcycle with sunglasses as Bad to the Bone is playing” we’re not doing that. But it should still feel like the Terminator.
Thank you toMattson Tomlinand Netflix for talking with us atAnime NYC!
