Director James Cameron reflected on one of his first films, “The Terminator,” and how elements of it have not stood the test of time.

The 70-year-old filmmaker called the action movie “pretty cringeworthy” on the 40th anniversary of its big premiere.

“I don’t think of it as some Holy Grail, that’s for sure,” Cameron told Empire during a recent interview. “I look at it now and there are parts of it that are pretty cringeworthy, and parts of it that are like, ‘Yeah, we did pretty well for the resources we had available.’”

”Just the production value, you know? I don’t cringe on any of the dialogue, but I have a lower cringe factor than, apparently, a lot of people do around the dialogue that I write,” he continued. “You know what? Let me see your three-out-of-the-four-highest-grossing films — then we’ll talk about dialogue effectiveness.”

“The Terminator” was a major hit when it debuted in 1984, grossing more than $78 million at the worldwide box office and cementing Arnold Schwarzenegger as a major movie star. The film also put Cameron on the map.

“I was just a punk starting out when I directed ‘The Terminator.’ I think I was 29 at the time, and it was my first directing gig,” the Academy Award-winning filmmaker told the outlet. “‘Terminator’ was my first film, and it’s near and dear for that reason.”

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There have been multiple “Terminator” spinoffs since then, and Cameron has alluded to the possibility of more in the future. But he said they won’t be the same.

“This is the moment when you jettison everything that is specific to the last 40 years of Terminator, but you live by those principles,” Cameron told Empire. “You get too inside it, and then you lose a new audience because the new audience care much less about that stuff than you think they do. That’s the danger, obviously, with ‘Avatar’ as well, but I think we’ve proven that we have something for new audiences.”

The filmmaker explained how that meant giving up on returning characters and starting fresh. 

“You’ve got powerless main characters, essentially, fighting for their lives, who get no support from existing power structures, and have to circumvent them but somehow maintain a moral compass. And then you throw AI into the mix,” he went on. 

“Those principles are sound principles for storytelling today, right? So I have no doubt that subsequent ‘Terminator’ films will not only be possible, but they’ll kick a**. But this is the moment where you jettison all the specific iconography.”

This update comes after each subsequent “Terminator” franchise addition has done a little worse than the one before, with “Terminator: Dark Fate” grossing just $62 million in 2019. 

Cameron alluded to more “Terminator” in the future. “It’s more than a plan,” he said. “That’s what we’re doing. That’s all I’ll say for right now.”

Ten days have passed since the first and only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, and the polling in battleground states has remained mostly unchanged, with neither candidate getting much of a bump.

Polling averages posted by RealClearPolitics and FiveThirtyEight show that the two candidates are still neck-and-neck in the seven major battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. According to RCP, Harris leads Trump by one-tenth of a percent in the averages of battleground state polling and has seen a slight dip since the September 10 debate on ABC. Trump’s average, meanwhile, is the same as it was 10 days ago.

Trump has held onto his slight lead over Harris in Arizona in the days following the debate, while his lead over Harris in Georgia has increased to just over 1 point, per the RCP average. FiveThirtyEight’s polling average also shows Trump remaining in the lead in Georgia, but the candidates are tied in Arizona, with Trump seeing a small dip since the debate.

In Nevada, Harris’ average has gone down since the debate, according to RCP, but FiveThirtyEight’s average shows the vice president’s numbers in the state staying the same over the past week while Trump’s average has slightly dipped.

The best post-debate polls for Harris came from results in Michigan and Pennsylvania that showed the vice president leading Trump by five points in both states. A Quinnipiac poll of more than 900 likely voters in Michigan showed Harris leading 51% to 46%, while a Quinnipiac poll of more than 1,000 likely Pennsylvania voters put Harris ahead by the same margin.

The Quinnipiac results combined with other post-debate polls, however, only slightly moved the needle in Harris’ direction in the two blue wall states. The Democratic nominee’s overall average lead in Pennsylvania since the debate has increased by just over a point while her lead in Michigan has gone up by less than a point since the debate, per FiveThirtyEight.

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The debate was viewed by many as lacking in-depth policy discussions, and the ABC News moderators were slammed by conservatives for targeting Trump and favoring Harris in their real-time fact-checks. Trump told Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld on Wednesday night that his “only regret” from the debate was not “going after” moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis for their “wrong” fact-checks.

Overall, neither Trump’s nor Harris’ standing in the polling averages of RealClearPolitcs and FiveThirtyEight shows much movement since their face-off on September 10, and neither candidate holds a lead larger than 3 points in any of the battleground states. Trump continues to outperform his polling numbers in battleground states at this point in both 2016 and 2020. His current numbers are 4 points better than where he was polling against President Joe Biden at this point in 2020.

Statistician Nate Silver, who founded FiveThirtyEight but now runs his own polling forecast, said on Friday that the latest polling shows “more good than bad for Harris in state polls,” but he added that the race is still a “toss-up.”

“When you’re near 50/50, a 1-point shift in the polls = about 8% of win probability shift in November,” Silver wrote. “So easy to end up on either side of the line on any given day.”