The lovely Kate Erbland mentioned this in her Cannes acquisition roundup earlier but, seeing how this is some of the biggest news to come out of France since someone saw someone else's underpants after they also saw London, here is the expanded version.

Producer Megan Ellison (TRUE GRIT, KILL BIN LADEN) and her Annapurna Films company beat out Lionsgate in a bid for the rights to make at least two more TERMINATOR films. It looked as if Lionsgate would be the victor on late Thursday, but Ellison won it out in the final hours. The winning bid was not disclosed, but Deadlineis reporting it could have been as high as 20 million dollars upfront, or around "half of the $29.5 million that Pacificor spent to claim the property in a bankruptcy auction." Ellison had no domestic distributor attached at the time of the bout, so this could turn out to be one hot ticket item in Tinseltown, making her risky offer not so risky after all.

Currently, FAST FIVE director Justin Lin is attached to helm TERMINATOR 5 (aka TERMINATOR 2012, as it has been rumored to be called around town) with Arnold Schwarzenegger making good on his promise of being back. Additionally, there was a rumor that surfaced recently that this film would also see the return of the original cast, with no specification of who exactly that was to be or if Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, Edward Furlong, or Robert Patrick were in fact in talks to reprise their roles. Lin dispelled that rumor and stated for MTV that, up until this point, the interactions have only been between he and Schwarzenegger.

Lin also stated at the time "We’re talking to different studios [about Terminator], but it has to be the right situation. If it’s not right, then I could totally move on and I should move on. Probably in the next three or four weeks, I’ll have a very clear picture [of what's next.]"