THEY'RE BACK

With the ultimate sci-fi franchise just a few short weeks away from its return to the big screen, another legend is apparently set to come storming back, although exactly when is not yet certain. The legend in question is The Terminator - the cyborg on a mission to destroy when he first arrived in 1984, but who had turned almost friendly for Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991.

James Cameron - who wrote and directed both movies - is reportedly in talks with both star Arnold Schwarzenegger and Fox (who, of course, produced the director's all-time most successful movie, Titanic) for a third assault on box-office records.

The rights to the Terminator franchise have been drifting around for a while, having been split between Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar (who produced Judgment Day at their now defunct Carolco) and Gale Anne Hurd, who produced the cyborg's first outing. But it was apparently Cameron who insisted that any sequel be made at Fox.

When Cap'n Jim gets to make the film is anybody's guess, since he is also toying with the idea of a movie which has similarly just emerged from almost a decade of litigation: Spider-Man. And if either of the two mooted stars - Jim Carrey or Leonardo DiCaprio - sign on for that one, finance should not be all that hard to raise.

SINGING, SHIPPING AND SCIENTOLOGY

He hasn't sung since Grease, and he's hardly danced - not counting a few self-parodic moments in Pulp Fiction - since Staying Alive. But John Travolta should be doing both in Standing Room Only, in which he will play real-life lounge singer Jimmy Roselli.

The latter may not be a household name to you and me, but he was apparently much appreciated by the mob, who packed his engagements at Vegas and elsewhere. Then Roselli changed his mind, declared he wanted nothing more to do with organized crime, and ended up with a price on his head.

That shouldn't have come as much of a surprise to anybody. What is surprising, though, is the director of Standing Room Only: Gus Van Sant, who was apparently the choice of both Travolta and his manager (who is also the film's producer), Jonathan Krane. Van Sant's days as a maverick indie look like being definitively over, what with Good Will Hunting, Psycho and now this.

Co-starring in Standing Room Only is Kelly Preston, who will be working with her husband for the first time since a long-forgotten 1989 flick called The Experts, which came right at the lowest spot of Travolta's decade in the wilderness. At least he met his wife on it. The couple look like co-starring again later in the year in the somewhat delayed movie version of Annie L Proulx's bestseller, The Shipping News.

In between, Travolta is expected to realise his decade-long dream of turning Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard's sci-fi tale, Battlefield Earth, into a movie. The $70-million film (which Roger Christian is to direct for Franchise Entertainment) is about an alien invasion which drives the earthlings underground - until, that is, they are rallied to a fightback under the command of a rebel leader.

Strangely enough, however, the rebel leader is not the role Travolta has marked out for himself. He will play the big baddie: bad in that he is the leader of the race of the aliens; big in that he is 10-foot-tall.

NO MORE MRS NICE GUY

Having departed sharply from her Merchant-Ivory image with last year's The Theory of Flight, in which she played a terminally ill wheelchair-bound woman determined to lose her virginity before she dies, Helena Bonham Carter looks like maintaining her hold on offbeat material with her next movie, Women Talking Dirty, currently shooting in Edinburgh.

The film, which marks the long-awaited debut of Elton John's production company, Rocket Pictures (launched with a lot of fanfare at Cannes two years ago), is about the unlikely friendship between two young Scottish women who support one another whenever life deals either of them a problem - which is fairly frequently. It is being directed by Coky Giedroyc, whose debut feature was the much-acclaimed 1996 low-budget Brit flick, Stella Does Tricks.