NEW YORK — “I’ll be back,” the line Arnold Schwarzenegger first uttered more than 30 years ago in that indelible manly monotone, belongs to the Terminator, of course. But it also might as well be the official slogan of the summer movie season.
It’s the time of year when Hollywood’s older, reliable brands, with the tenacity of Schwarzenegger’s lethal cyborg, claw their way back onto the big screen in a popcorn parade of big-budget sequels, reboots and re-dos. That’s nothing new, but the extent of the sequel spinning is.
The sequel expansion — as headlong as Tom Cruise in the “Mission: Impossible” movies — runs in all directions, stretching into prequels, second-try reboots, spinoffs and franchises that are less linear, Roman-numeral progressions than (as in the brimming Marvel world) whole universes of overlapping characters: fantasy realms to visit, not just stories to follow.
To fuel the proliferation, Hollywood is dipping ever deeper into its vaults: 10 of this summer’s most anticipated blockbusters have origins dating back more than three decades, including “Fantastic Four,” “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Terminator: Genisys,” the fifth film in the series created by James Cameron in 1984. Schwarzenegger is back to say that he’s back.