As James Cameron announces that any future Terminator film will ‘jettison everything’ that came before, we wonder whether it’s a case of franchise history repeating…
Forty years old this year, The Terminator is the movie that made careers. It turned writer-director James Cameron and producer Gale Anne Hurd from 20-something hopefuls into the kinds of filmmakers 20th Century Fox would trust with the Alien franchise. It cemented Arnold Schwarzenegger’s status as a true Hollywood star. And yet, for all the attempts to turn it into a true franchise over the past four decades, most would agree that only The Terminator and its immediate sequel, 1991’s T2: Judgment Day (also directed by Cameron) are true classics.
Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, directed by Jonathan Mostow and released in 2003, was the point where the franchise mentality really kicked in; although far from terrible, it had few fresh ideas and no real reason to exist beyond the assumption that if another Terminator film were made then people would buy a ticket to see it.
Then the reboots started happening. Terminator: Salvation, directed by McG and released in 2009, was originally envisioned as a direct sequel to Rise Of The Machines, with Nick Stahl and Claire Danes reprising their respective roles as John Connor and Kate Brewster, who emerge from the apocalyptic Judgment Day to lead the resistance against Skynet and its cyborg army. Then years of legal wrangling over the Terminator rights, plus a revolving door of screenwriters who all took a pass at the Salvation script, eventually turned the resulting film into a soft reset of sorts, with Christian Bale and Bryce Dallas Howard taking over as John and Kate.
Salvation’s idea of setting the film in the future rather than the present was a novel one, and like Terminator 3, there were glimmers of good ideas here and there – plus the late, much-missed Anton Yelchin delivered a soulful take on Kyle Reese. Its action felt oddly tension-free, though, and its hastily-revised ending lacked bite. (The conclusion originally conceived, by contrast, would have been among the darkest of its kind to hit a multiplex since David Fincher’s Seven.)
In what would soon become a pattern, Salvation was originally billed as the first in a trilogy of movies – a plan that was nixed when the film failed to do the business expected of it. As a result, we got Terminator: Genisys in 2015, another reboot which essentially ignored everything established by the two films released after T2.
Like 2009’s Star Trek reboot, also produced by Skydance, Genisys attempted to be both the start of a new three-part franchise (and even a spin-off TV series…) as well as a continuation of bits and pieces beloved by fans of the first two films. Arnold Schwarzenegger was back as a high-mileage T-800, nicknamed ‘Pops’ by the new Sarah Connor, played by Emilia Clarke. Director Alan Taylor even used a bit of VFX trickery to re-create entire scenes from the 1984 original.
Behind the scenes, however, things didn’t go well on Terminator: Genisys. It’s not clear exactly where the problems arose, but Alan Taylor swore off directing a feature film again for years afterwards, and Clarke later revealed that the crew on Fantastic Four – another doomed production unravelling at the same time – wore jackets that read, “At least we’re not on Terminator.”
Podcast | Episode 400: The Terminator (1984) with Gale Anne Hurd
Financially, Genisys was an improvement on Salvation, but the film itself assuredly wasn’t. Clarke and particularly Jai Courtney, as a beefier, less sparky Kyle Reese, felt oddly cast. The plot, which re-imagined Skynet as some sort of sentient mobile phone operating system, felt like a misguided attempt to move the franchise on from its Cold War roots.
Much like the other post-T2 movies, Genisys also struggled to come up with an interesting new spin on the cyborg assassin concept; the best Rise Of The Machines could come up with was, ‘What if the T-1000 looked like a woman?’. Genisys serves up another T-1000 (this one played by Lee Byung-hun) and also the surprise addition of a T-3000 – a cyborg made from a cloud of nanobots, which really isn’t so different from the T-1000’s mimetic polyalloy, at least visually.
Skydance looked at the response to Genisys and quietly dropped its plans for the two sequels and a spin-off series. In their place came Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), directed by Deadpool’s Tim Miller. Once again, it was a soft reboot, ignoring everything that happened in Genisys, Salvation and Rise Of The Machines.
It attempted a back-to-basics approach, of sorts, with the plot being a straight pursuit movie with a new killer cyborg, the Rev-9, after a new future saviour of humanity (Natalia Reyes). In the place of Kyle Reece, we had the self-described ‘super-soldier from the future’, Grace, played by Mackenzie Davis. (We’ll gloss over what the film does to Edward Furlong’s John Connor in order to create its revised version of future history, except to say: yeesh.)
Much of this might have worked, but then Dark Fate decided to double down on Genisys’ nostalgia for the first two films by dragging back not just Arnold Schwarzenegger – here playing a former killer cyborg turned curtain fitter named Carl – but also Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, whose post-retirement hobby is hunting down and killing cyborgs like some sort of pest control expert.
James Cameron served as executive producer on Dark Fate, and his working relationship with Miller was evidently not a happy one. The pair clashed over the film’s plot and direction to such an extent that Miller openly said in interviews that ‘the blood is still being scrubbed off the walls’ following its combative editing process. In the years since, both have distanced themselves from the film in their own ways.
Reviews of Dark Fate were less brutal than they were for Genisys, but audiences still didn’t seem enthused; its box-office takings amounted to roughly $260m – almost half of what Genisys made four years earlier. You can probably guess what happened next: James Cameron and his producers scrapped the two sequels they’d already mapped out.
As The Terminator’s 40th anniversary dawns, all fans have to mark the occasion is a Netflix animated series, Terminator Zero, which is admittedly rather good. Its future in cinemas, however, is currently uncertain; talking to Empire about the franchise he unwittingly triggered in 1984, James Cameron recently said that, with the rights still under his control, he hopes to reboot it again at some point. Assuming he does so, in between making Avatar sequels and his planned drama Last Train From Hiroshima, Cameron says his next Terminator movie would “Jettison everything” that came before it.
“This is the moment when you jettison everything that is specific to the last 40 years of Terminator,” he said, “but you live by those principles.”
What Cameron means by ‘those principles’ is open to interpretation. The Terminator franchise, more so even than Halloween or any other film series this writer can think of, has spent the past 30 or so years politely ignoring itself. The only thing that is truly consistent between the various reboots is their makers’ obsession with the summer phenomenon that was T2: Judgment Day back in 1991. With its ground-breaking special effects, stunningly-conceived action and huge box office take, T2 delivered a sugar high that producers and writers have tried and failed to replicate ever since.
The one thing filmmakers are truly reluctant to do, it seems, is properly return to grunginess and early-1980s grime of the original Terminator. Where T2 was a clean-edged, steely summer film starring Schwarzenegger at his Planet Hollywood apex, The Terminator took place in scuzzy flophouses, Los Angeles back alleys and tacky nightclubs. Entire sequences were shot on the hoof, without permits. Its action set pieces were bloody and disturbing – the sequences where innocent bystanders and entire precincts full of cops are ruthlessly gunned down are, if anything, more disquieting in 2024 than they were back then.
Strip away the sci-fi elements, and The Terminator’s a slasher horror film, with Schwarzenegger its implacable killer and Linda Hamilton its archetypal Final Girl. That none of the sequels have sought to return to that stripped-down concept is doubly ironic given that, as would-be blockbuster films have floundered in recent years, low-budget horror movies have been reliably profitable. There’s even a precedent for the style and tone a lower-budget Terminator reboot could follow: David Robert Mitchell’s 2014 horror classic It Follows. That movie, in its own way, feels more like a Terminator film than Genisys or Dark Fate – you just have to imagine that its relentless pursuing force is technical rather than supernatural.
Of course, not every series needs to carry on forever, but if The Terminator really has to be rebooted yet again, maybe its owners should look back at the 1984 original in all its rough-hewed brilliance. In a franchise intent on constantly wiping the slate clean and ignoring its own sequels, the first Terminator may be its most overlooked asset of all.
—Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
