This is what I'm thinking from what we've heard and reality.
1. Terminator is not a massive franchise, nor has it been a huge franchise for 22 years. Most of the young people I know today have never seen, nor care to see Terminator. So if these people are looking to make money....which I bet they are. So many have no idea what Terminator is, nor the back story. Terminator Salvation and T3 convoluted the whole story and time line so extensively, it would be foolish, and just sloppy to try to "fix it" and have a sequel that tries to "erase the bad". So to me that indicates just with what I've seen it's a reboot.
2. The actresses/actors they have picked. Well we have a young Sarah Connor being picked, so it's not an old Sarah, we are going back to the beginning....which would be 1984. I doubt they are going to spend the money and effort to make this a "period" piece if they tried to make some pseudo alternate timeline type of thing. You can do that with Trek, because we don't go back in time to the "80's" But you can't with Terminator. So to me that's more proof it's not going to be a "soft" reboot. It's going to be a full on reboot because we have young Kyle, young Sarah, and a little bit older John Connor.
I doubt they will have a soft reboot that will....somehow make Sarah young in the present day? No they won't spend the money on retro-fitting everything. Which gets me to another point later. So with the people they are looking at it's clear they are going back to the beginning of it all with Sarah, because that's where it starts.
They are not going to make some pseudo sequel trying to explain everything with alternate timelines on top of already other altered timelines. With Trek it was clean, but this would be too convoluted to explain to a new audience that does not care as much about Terminator. So again I think that points more to a reboot. A more solid one. A soft-reboot having Sarah having John in present day would be too much of a stretch having a 30 year difference in the timeline and just say..."go with it."
It's cleaner and easier to get a new generation to love Terminator by just scrapping all the old and starting a-new. Showing the new generation what we loved about Terminator. And introducing them to it all. Because whether we think so or not, most the GA does not know much of the Terminator story anymore.
3. Money. They will not spend 200 million on this, it is in a very heavy competition market, so they will spend I bet 100-150 million, so it's not going to be I bet some massive future war movie, it will probably be smaller scale to start out, and that would hint more towards the Terminator 1 story line re-booted. Present time, make it easier cleaner, and cheaper because you don't "retro" everything back to the 80's.
So I'm hopeful for this movie, I'll be open to it until it comes out.
But with all these points I'm pretty sure they would not be doing themselves any favors unless they rebooted it. They want to make lots of money Megan spent her own money to buy this franchise. And TS did terrible in the BO. They are not going to risk by having some...sequel based off of two pretty hated films, and 2 great films that were released before most were born anymore.
Next to Episode VII and Interstellar I'm rooting for this one alongside them, but out of those three projects this one I'm most worried about.
But I hope with Megan behind them she makes the right choices.
Oh and last thing, it's called "Terminator" not Terminator 5. I hate how the PR had clearly stated that yet all these trades keep calling it T5.
