Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator. Image: Orion Pictures

Four years after the well-intentioned but dull Terminator Salvation , it appears that Skynet’s favorite unstoppable killing machine — literally — will once again make good on its promise to be back with new reports emerging of a brand new Terminator movie to start production in January of next year. What’s more, the original Terminator? star Arnold?Schwarzenegger has announced that he will starring in the next iteration of the long-running franchise.

“I’m very happy that the studios want me to be in? Terminator 5 ?and to star as the Terminator, which we start shooting in January,” said Schwarzenegger at?the?21st Century Financial Education Summit in Sydney, Australia.

More details of the fifth installment in the once-popular science fiction franchise are also emerging online.? Deadline Hollywood reports that the movie will be a co-production between Paramount Pictures, Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures production company, which purchased the rights to the franchise for $20 million in 2011, her brother David Ellison’s Skydance Productions, with each partner funding a third of the costs for the movie.

The combination of both Ellisons is an interesting one. Megan’s Annapurna Pictures has tended to focus on more highbrow fare like Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty , while?Skydance was the production company behind big budget successes like? Mission Impossible ?Ghost Protocol , G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Star Trek Into Darkness . Does the partnership between both companies suggest that the final product will satisfy both critics and the summer box office?

Well, perhaps. Last anyone heard , the script was being written by the minds that brought you Avatar , Shutter Island and My Bloody Valentine , after all. And two names have been repeatedly mentioned in connection with the director’s gig for the new movie — Fast and Furious franchise kingpin Justin Lin and Zero Dark Thirty ‘s Kathryn Bigelow — though it’s not certain whether either one is involved with the project.

Nevertheless, the Ellisons and Paramount need to find the right director — or really, any director — quickly. According to both Schwarzenegger and other sources, the movie is slated to start filming in January of next year, and time really is of the essence in this case; in less than six years, copyright law will mean that the rights to the Terminator franchise will revert back to creator James Cameron in 2019, 35 years after the first Terminator movie.

With an early 2014 start date, the earliest we’ll see a big budget Terminator 5 in theaters is summer 2015, meaning at most two more movies before Cameron steps in to take charge of what may remain his most well-known creation. Given the lackluster response to Terminator Salvation — or, for that matter, Terminator 3: Rise of The Machines , the other non-Cameron movie in the series — perhaps that would be for the best. Skynet’s schemes seem to work best when its creator is in charge, after all.