A flurry of headlines this week hinting at the possibility of a return for Arnold Schwarzenegger in a fifth Terminator film, thanks largely to a slightly mischievous Deadline piece linking the former Governator's announcement on Friday that he is officially back in the acting game to suggestions that studios may be interested in fronting the cash for a new film.

Of course, this is hardly surprising. On the first day at film-blogger school, students are informed that any missed opportunities to link Arnie and future Terminator movies are likely to result in instant banishment at best, and a slow lowering into super-heated liquid metal, à la the denouement of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, at the very very worst. Even so, I'm not going to pour cold water on the idea because it will probably happen.

Sylvester Stallone, after all, returned for a sixth Rocky film at the age of 60, while 55-year-old Bruce Willis still makes a pretty decent action hero, as seen in last year's Red. Schwarzenegger is now 63, and after a pretty downbeat end to his career in politics just might be tempted to take the easy ego-building step of a return to his best-known role. He surely cannot need the money.

Financial concerns, however, will lie at the heart of any future Terminator outing. The rights to the franchise are now owned by a hedge fund named Pacificor, which in turn nabbed them from another faceless monolith named Halcyon Asset Management in bankruptcy court last year. The days of studios owning the rights to long-running series have apparently been replaced by a new era in which our best-known cultural icons are overseen by accountants. Well, plus ca change, I guess.

Deadline reports that Universal may be interested in buying the rights to Terminator and asking Justin Lin, who has overseen the last two instalments of The Fast and the Furious, to take the reins. This hardly bodes well for any hope the series might be set for a more cerebral direction.

James Cameron famously said, when discussing Terminator's later instalments, that he had "told the story" with parts one and two, and it's tempting to take the line that no one but its creator has the right to meddle with the series. And yet Terminator, whether Cameron (or the general viewing public) likes it or not, has taken on a life of its own after Judgment Day, with two movies, a TV series and a slew of comics all arriving since that first sequel. Christopher Nolan, I am brave enough to tell you, did not actually invent Batman, nor was his debut effort featuring the caped crusader the first to hit the big screen. There's no reason future Terminators cannot be great, as the series' furniture offers plenty of opportunity for comment on intriguing Asimov-esque subjects such as the nature of sentience and the machine soul, while leaving lots of room for the kind of sensual obliteration those of us who secretly love good action movies are rather fond of.

There might even be ways to include Schwarzenegger without destroying audiences' ability to suspend their disbelief. Who's to say terminators do not age on the surface, even as they maintain their inner strength? (Some clever clogs will now no doubt correct me on this.) After all, the best way to synthesise skin that appears human would be to use human biological architecture, which might result in an effect similar to ageing. At the same time, if any more terminators get sent back in time during the series, easyJet is likely to start trying to get in on the action by offering a rival cut-price service.

If Arnie is going to be back, the starting points are a good story and a great film-maker to bring it to life. Deadline reckons William Wisher, Cameron's collaborator on Terminator 2 and an uncredited co-writer on the original, has a 24-page treatment for Terminator 5 in place, with a four-page outline of the sixth movie also in the bag. Like the Terminator himself, we probably can't stop more films from coming. Let's hope they don't turn out to have been sent by the enemy this time around.