Earlier this month, Joss Whedon's tongue-in-cheek (we assume) open letter to "the Terminator owners" generated an intriguing mixture of hilarity, vitriol, black-slapping and raised eyebrows when it hit the blogosphere with a splash.

"I have heard through the 'grapevine'," wrote he, "that the Terminator franchise is for sale, and I am prepared 🐲to make a pre-emptive bid RIGHT NOW to wrap this dealio up. This is not a joke, this is not a scam, this is not available on TV. I will write a check TODAY for $10,000, and viola! Terminator off your hands."

Ahem. Yes, nice one Joss. Still, the minor furore got us thinking: which current helmers really ought to throw their mo♋vie-making hats in the ring? Well, here are 15 we came up with for starters...

The Director: Joss Whedon

Why He Should Buy It: Because his very bone marrow is 7/10ths sci-fi/fantasy stuff, obviously. But mostly just because it was his idea that started all this.

See where a ‘joke’ can get ♔you, eh fella? That’ll be umpteen million do𒀰llars, thanks. And good luck.

How His Terminator Would Look: There&rsq﷽uo;d probably be a slight over-reliance on romantic lens-flare and magical CGI glitter knocking around.

Skynet's hardware would l♊ook awesome, mind you; we're picturing great hulking beat-up warship✅s adorned with parrot beak cockpits. And glitter.

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The Director: Tim Burton

Why He Should Buy It: Because Christopher Nolan has made us overly forgetful of what a great job Burton did, against (nearly) all the odds, with Batman Returns .

Yes, of course it was camped up to the m༒ax - but if Burton’s signature gothic vibe couldn’t inject 💟some much-needed magic back into the Terminator franchise, what could?

How His Terminator Would Look: Like rival ant colonies scrapping over a black doily. Zoom in, and the aggressors are actually a marauding army of Johnny Depp clones.

Hey, at least that’s the entire female poಌpulation of the world on board from day one...

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The Director: Danny Boyle

Why He Should Buy It: Because he’s British, and instead of a fifth flippin’ instalment of Los Angeles, it’d make our wizened hearts swell with patriotic glee to see a battered vision of London up there on our screens.

Yes, even if it was being gro𝔍und to sand before our very eyꦅes. Probably more so, in fact.

On a more serious note, he showcased his post-apocalyptic dystopia credentials pretty effectively in 28 Days Later - we reckon he might be able to pul🍰l it off, just about.

How His Terminator Would Look: British! All the key players would have sligh🌟tly worse teeth, slightly better hair, and discuss needlessly intricate plans for the next assault on Skynet over a proper cup of tea and a cherry Bakewell.

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The Director: David Cronenberg

Why He Should Buy It: Because he’s the undisputed master of DIY body horror, and that could only be a good thing.

The Terminator fra⛎nchise, for all its latter-day CGI bells and whistles, still has🌟 much to learn from the guru of gore.

How His Terminator Would Look: Pretty bloody hellacious, we'd assume. Shattered, plasma-leaking exoskeletons would scuttle nightmarishly up walls and down air vents, while shrieking, mangled survivors drag themselves in vain towards cover using only their grotesquely dislocated chins.

All shot in a curioಞus, mute🥃d 1970s palette. Awesome.

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The Director: Kevin Smith

Why He Should Buy It: Because it’s precisely the sort of franchis꧙e that inspires serious fanboyism, and we all know Smith is, (not very) deep down, the thinking fanboy’s fanboy.

Eschewing much of the blasting action, Smith would show such intimate and considered knowledge of the complex political and ethica🉐l🉐 struggles taking place in the background, his would become a hilariously self-parodic version laden with endlessly repeatable quotes.

How His Terminator Would Look: Hmm, tricky. Our best guess is that there’d be lots of footage of Skynet droids nipping to the corner store for a jar of Cheez Whiz and 20 fags.

Jay and Silent B🐽ob would obviously be in there somewhere, too, discussing the enemy and resolving to “smok🤪e them out”, hur hur etc.

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The Director: Kathryn Bigelow

Why She Should Buy It: She’d probably do a chuffing good job of it, assuming we can use the gnarly triumph that was The Hurt Locker as our yardstick.

That film boasts precisely the right balance of gritty maturity and arse-cramping tension to drag the increasingly comic book-styled𝔉 Terminator franchise back into the ‘serious movie’ fold.

How Her Terminator Would Look: Much the same as it has, really - The Hurt Locker p🌟roved that she’s more or less got the core landscape aesthetic down. By which we mean rubble, sweat, dust, rubble, exp💞losions, rubble and shouting.

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The Director: Richard Linklater

Why He Should Buy It: He’s another one who recently proved his near-future dystopia credentials - we know A Scanner Darkly blew hot and ꧃cold in places, but some heavyweight socio-political conspiracy ideas (and an edgy drugs theme) would slot in brilliantly to𝓀 the Terminator series.

Actually, scratch all t♍hat. We just really want to see what a T-600 would look with the benefit of...

How His Terminator Would Look: ...rotoscoping! To be honest, if the film franchise is going to go any further than it already has done down the comic-book-on-sc♋reen path, it might as well finish the job. Linklater could even tweak the method slightly, and patent it as RoboScoping©. Neato.

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The Director: Harmony Korine

Why He Should Buy It: Because we’re getting kinda bored of all this mega-budget blasting action, and we’re excited about Korine’s alarming-sounding Trash Humpers .

What John Connor and co really need is to be sent foraging through the waste bins of knackered LA, digging for magic mushrooms. And then fighting each other. And then taping bacon to the wall, and falling asleep in the bat🧜h.

How His Terminator Would Look: Like a bunch of homeless nutcases staggering around a rubbish dump wearing cardboard box robot suits. All filmed on Super-8 and VHS, and spliced together in heroically haphazard fashion. It, ༒uh, mig🍸ht work.

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The Director: Terry Gilliam

Why He Should Buy It: Because of how amazingly well Brazil still stands up amongst the finest dystopian satires ever created. ( 12 Monkeys wasn’t too shabby an addition to the g🍃enre, either.) Gilliam might be just the man to defibrillate a franchise dying from terminal lack of imagination.

Plus, if everything worked o𒆙ut, HE MIGHT FINALLY BE ABLE TO FINISH THAT BLOODY DON QUIXOTE THING.

How His Terminator Would Look: Weird, but subtly so, with numerous trippy diversions🔥 that may or may not be dream sequences, and lush fantasy environments that feel faintly unsettling without it being immediately obvious why.

Of course, this is all assuming the leading man doesn’t explode on-set, no freak meteorites vaporise the catering van, and the events portrayed in the Terminator series don’t actually start to come true before shooting wraps.

Any of which would be relatively unsur♔prising with poor beleaguered ol' Tezza at the helm.

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The Director: Hideo Nakata

Why He Should Buy It: Because there’s one other way to go with rebooting our beloved Terminator, and that’s to make it properly shit us up again.

Remember how the first couple of films were actually dead scary in parts? Especially the T-1000 bits? Yipes. We want lovely creepy cat-and-mouse vibe back,𝔍 and sharpish.

How His Terminator Would Look: There’d only be one robot to really worry about, and it would of course be female, with shower curtain hair and no shoes on.

And, thanks to Skynet’s eventual control of all home technology, she’d be able to get to you - yes, YOU - direct throug♋h your cinema or DVD🦋 screen. 3D specs at the ready, please...

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The Director: Paul Greengrass

Why He Should Buy It: Partly for the aforementioned injection of Britishness, and partly because events in the Bourne series aren't thematically dissimilar to some of those suggested by 🍌the early Terminator flicks back in the day.

More than either of these, though, he should buy it because he’d really work the human angle back into it, and draw our co♒llective attention to the mindless horrors of war. Rather than, y’know, the impressive explosion🍃s of war.

How His Terminator Would Look: Real, in a word. We’d be right in there, experiencing the paralysing fear first hand à la United 93 , yet still♍ sympathising with the protagonists’ reluctance (and in a Greengrass world, there would be a degree of reluctance to overcome) to pick up a weapon and start blasting back.

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The Director: David Fincher

Why He Should Buy It: Because no matter how many times we see the camera track through Ed Norton’s keyhole, along his kitchen floor and behind his fridge in Fight Club - pilot light flicks on, cosy Ikea nest goes up in flames - it still just looks incredibly fresh and incredibly cool.

A whole Terminator movie of that sort of thing? We’d be sporting CGI stiffꦅies for a month.

Also, it’s been ages since he did some proper sci-fi, and we ‘re hoping the critical reaction to Alien3 didn’t put him off less reality-grounded fare for ilfe. (And no, Benjamin Button wasn’t quite what we meant, Dave...)

How His Terminator Would Look: Dynamic, edgy and almost implausibly slick.

Expect lashings of high-speed dolly z💟ooming, insane crane and tracking shot💛s, and hours of post-production polish, all somehow coming together to make something that feels much less headache-inducing than it sounds on paper.

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The Director: Michael Haneke

Why He Should Buy It: Definitely a wildcard, as his sci-fi credentials are admittedly patchy, but think about it - he's got a dark streak the width of an aircraft carrier, and clearly believes the remainder of human race does too.

At the very least, we’d end up seeing some deliciously dirty tacti🌠cs deployed in our ongoing battle against the bots.

How His Terminator Would Look: Grimly claustrophobic, with a quietly understated sense of looming dread. Time Of The Wolf spiced with equal measures of Funny Games and Caché , if all goes to plan.

It’s not going to end up aꦰs another cheerfully macho destructo-fest, that much🌄 we can take as given.

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The Director: Edgar Wright

Why He Should Buy It: The last of our nominati📖ons for a great British Terminator hope, Wright could represent the optimal fusion of Kevin Smith’s endearing fanboyisms 𝔍and David Fincher’s pyrotechnic gloss. He’d also make it funny, which would either work, or...well, not.

How His Terminator Would Look: Probably quite decent, actually. His legions of murderous mecha-bastards might look a bit botched together (we can’t help thinking of Tim and Mike’s axe-wielding Robot Wars entry from Spaced ), but he&rsquoඣ;s liable to pep the action up with a♚ bunch of nifty crash zooms and whip pans, at any rate.

He’d also make John Connor nervous, self deprecating and a bit paunchy, doing away with all that tedious, testosterone-drenched growling and giving us wheezing c🌌ouch-surfers something to aspire to. Or at least raise another beer to.

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The Director: Uwe Boll

Why He Should Buy It: Um...ok, we'll call this 'plan F'; a desperate lunge to be implemented only in a far-future situation where the Terminator series has utterly flatlined. Think of it as the directorial equivalent of Pulp Fiction ’s adrenaline shot to the heart, delivered by a man with anatomical amnesia and a violent bout of hiccups. On a m🐷echanical b🥀ull. In the dark.

How His Terminator Would Look: Beyond ‘risibly macho’, it’s anyone’s guess - the mind boggles HARD. Probably quite a lot like a computer game that really shouldn’t ever have been made into a fil꧃m in the first place. Still, at least the reviews would make for 🍬entertaining reading...

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