Ten years ago, the marketing campaign for Terminator: Genisys was in full swing. It really didn’t go well.
Beneath furrowed brows and leather jackets and an ominous grey sky, the headline blared: ‘How to Save a Billion-Dollar Franchise.’
It was the 30th October 2014, and the marketing campaign for Terminator: Genisys had begun with a bang. Well, not so much a bang as a confused, ‘Eh?’
Entertainment Weekly had the exclusive reveal for the sci-fi sequel, the fifth instalment in a franchise that was then 30 years old. After the so-so performance of 2009’s Terminator: Salvation, the property rights were now in the hands of a new production company – Skydance – and the messaging from all concerned was clear: The Terminator was going back to its 1980s roots.
Emilia Clarke was to star as the new Sarah Connor, taking over from Linda Hamilton; Jai Courtney was now the new, brawnier Kyle Reese, replacing Michael Biehn. More pivotally, in a bid to keep long-time fans on side, Arnold Schwarzenegger emphatically wasn’t being replaced as the Terminator; he’d return as a cyborg whose human flesh had aged over his shiny, bullet-proof endoskeleton.
It was a repeat of the approach Skydance had taken with its 2009 Star Trek reboot, directed by JJ Abrams: it hooked in a younger cast to play characters familiar from the original 1960s TV series, but also had Leonard Nimoy return as Mr Spock to boost its credentials.
After months of secrecy, Entertainment Weekly’s cover story was the first time the public had seen Clarke, Courtney or any of its other stars in character. The photos were widely shared, but not for the reasons Terminator: Genisys’ marketing people might have hoped. Clarke and Courtney, along with co-stars Jason Clarke (the new John Connor) and Matt Smith (whose character was then unnamed) were all clad in black, military-adjacent garb, clutching guns and putting their best war faces on.
Everything looked just a little… off, though. For battle-hardened heroes fighting for their lives, the characters all looked suspiciously clean; beneath his long black coat, Courtney wore a fine-striped T-shirt that looked as though it’d just been purchased from Gap. Emilia Clarke posed uncomfortably with some kind of anti-tank rifle that, in an accompanying interview, even she admitted was “a foot and a half taller than me.”
Matt Smith fared even worse in the weaponry department; he was caught holding a futuristic gun that looked for all the world like the sort of thing you’d take paintballing.
Then there were those war faces: Emilia Clarke, teeth bared, looking like someone yelling at a neighbour’s child to, for god’s sake, just stop kicking that ball against her bay window, already. Matt Smith appeared to have been asked by the photographer to both hold his gun at arms length and stare down its scope, making him look like a lion from a certain 1960s comedy.
The reaction to the photos, both on social media and from online outlets, wasn’t what you’d call charitable. Nor did the first emerging details about the film’s plot, which rewrote history so that Sarah Connor was raised from childhood to become a bad-ass freedom fighter by a tamed T-800 (Schwarzenegger, of course) whom she’s affectionately nicknamed ‘pops’.
Still, it was only a photo shoot, ultimately, and Terminator: Genisys’ marketers duly pressed on. The film wasn’t due for release until July 2015, and so there was still plenty of time to change the narrative.
The sequel’s first trailer was unveiled in December 2014, and all things considered, it didn’t look too bad. Its depiction of a future war between humans and machines was present and correct; in context, the actors all looked far more convincing in their roles than they did in that earlier photoshoot. Emilia Clarke didn’t appear to be able to fire a gun without closing her eyes first, but Jason Clarke brought his gravitas to bear as a grown-up, battle-scarred John Connor, leader of the human resistance.
It was in the second trailer, released in April 2015, that another baffling decision was made: it decided to blow one of the finished film’s big plot twists.
Alan Taylor, Terminator: Genisys’ director, didn’t hide his displeasure at the trailer’s reveal. That June, days before Genisys appeared in cinemas, Taylor was asked by Uproxx whether he was consulted about the trailer, to which he replied, “I had a few heads-ups and a few unpleasant conversations where I squawked about this or that.”
“I certainly directed those scenes with the intention that no one would know,” Taylor added of the reveal spoiled in the trailer. “…everything from there until the turn, you’re supposed to think, Oh man, this is great.”
In the same interview, Taylor also admitted that there was a certain amount of uncertainty among Terminator: Genisys’ marketers – a fear that it would be seen as a reboot (which it sort of was).
“I know there was kind of a challenging calculus going on in the heads of those who market this thing to decide that this was the right thing to do,” Taylor said. “I think they felt like they had to send a strong message to a very wary audience that there was something new, that this was going to new territory. They were concerned that people were misperceiving this as kind of a reboot, and none of us wanted to reboot two perfect movies by James Cameron. I think they felt they had to do something game-changing in how the film was being perceived.”
To lend a hand, James Cameron came forward to defend the film. In a video shared by Yahoo, Cameron – who’d been given a preview screening of Terminator: Genisys – said he regarded it as the true sequel to his movies, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. “If you like the Terminator films,” he said, “you’re going to love this movie.”
Given that Cameron had been openly critical about Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines and Terminator: Salvation in the past, his endorsement certainly sounded like good news for Gensisys. “It’s being very respectful of the first two films,” he enthused, “and then all of a sudden it serves and now I’m going on a journey.”
Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger, never a slouch when it comes to marketing, was busy doing YouTube videos, tie-ins with wrestling federations and private screenings for charities.
By the end of June, however, the first reviews began to appear, and it wasn’t good news. Although the film went out of its way in its attempt to please existing fans and draw in new audiences with stars from the likes of Game Of Thrones and Doctor Who, the general consensus was that it fell into an awkward middle ground; the violent rawness of the 1984 original was gone, as was the novelty of the 1991 sequel’s spectacular visuals.
Entertainment Weekly, rather damningly, described it as a “bad time-travel movie” with a “brainteasingly byzantine narrative.”
Terminator: Genisys wasn’t exactly a disaster with audiences – it made just over $440m at the box office. But what was more telling was how those involved in the film distanced themselves afterwards; few, it seems, particularly enjoyed making the movie. James Cameron later said he’d only said nice things about Genisys to help out his old friend, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Emilia Clarke expressed to Vanity Fair her “relief” that the film hadn’t done well enough to make her contractually obligated to play Sarah Connor again.
Of his own experience in making Terminator: Genisys, Alan Taylor told The Hollywood Reporter, “I had lost the will to make movies.I lost the will to live as a director. I’m not blaming any person for that. The process was not good for me. So I came out of it having to rediscover the joy of filmmaking.”
Taylor said elsewhere, perhaps with a certain amount of regret, that people around him had tried to tell him not to make Genisys, but he took the gig anyway, thinking he could “fix the script and everything would be great.”
Comments like these might help explain exactly what happened with Terminator: Genisys’ calamitous marketing campaign. The Terminator property had been doing pass-the-parcel between production companies for years, each one seeing it as a potential “billion dollar franchise” and trying, in their own way, to turn a sci-fi horror concept into a four-quadrant multiplex-filler. Skydance had acquired the rights at auction by 2013, and Genisys was willed into being within the space of two years. The fifth film didn’t need to exist on a creative level so much as it had to happen in order to justify the millions of dollars its producers had paid for the IP. And from a marketing perspective, how are you supposed to sell a dark sci-fi thriller as an all-things-to-all-people summer blockbuster? With difficulty, is the answer.
When Genisys failed to perform as expected, the plug was pulled on a pair of sequels and a spin-off TV series, and the franchise was rebooted yet again with 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate. Schwarzenegger was back again. So too was James Cameron, insisting that, no, seriously, this really was the sequel fans had been waiting for. Then the film came out and everyone distanced themselves from it.
Time travel may not exist in the real world just yet, but film history still has an uncanny way of repeating itself.
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