There are a few updates from the consulting producer on the new Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles about the new Terminator film, and while most aren't any big surprise, one is rather interesting.

We actually already heard that The Halcyon Company owns the franchise rights, and that they were looking to make it into a franchise, but the interesting part is what he says about the timeline.

For Terminator 4 the series producer says through IGN that the story will pick up from Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines and that both John Connor and Kate Brewster are in the script (I think Billy picked up on this in comments on the previous story), however here's the killer.

The film is going to feature a new hero at it's core.

Now I've written about this before in previous rumours somewhere, but it really did strike me as odd considering that John Connor is the lead, he's the head of the resistance, and the entire series has been about protecting him and allowing him to live to the future so that he can gather humanity together to fight back and eventually defeat the machines.

So why then are we going to follow a new hero all of a sudden? Even when we are saying that John Connor is in the script?

Two things could be happening here, one is that they are going to have John Connor removed from the series and show that the future can happen despite the way it was predicted, or the series is going off on a tangent or perhaps a smaller scale, maybe looking at battles fought within the war rather than the whole epic tale.

Frankly I would hope it's the latter, but it still doesn't seem right to me, it seems that we are the ones abandoning John Connor just when he is about to hit the most difficult moments of his own life. I mean so far he's just had to survive against a single machine with tons of help, now he's going to be leading humanity in a war against millions of the machines in all different forms, and we haven't even seen their complete rise yet.

It's like we've had a little intro to the character and we're leaving him before his story really begins.

Looking at the quotes made by the producer it does look as though it is the latter. He says that the character is going to be as Ben Hur was to Jesus, which sounds like we are dumping John Connor totally, and to me that feels like I've been cheated out of a story.