After three increasingly worse attempts to capture the magic without James Cameron’s involvement, the “Terminator” franchise was in a complete rut.
Whilst the first two Cameron films remain classics of cinema, “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” was merely passable, whilst the less said about “Terminator: Salvation” and especially “Terminator: Genisys” the better.
Thus came the news of “Terminator: Dark Fate,” a film that would effectively adopt the “Halloween” 2018 plan to revive a failing franchise – a legacy sequel that ignored the events of the non-Cameron sequels. In many ways, the film was sold on being the ‘real’ “Terminator 3” and, if successful, would kick off a new run of these films.
On top of that, the pedigree was impressive with James Cameron back (albeit only as a producer) alongside “Deadpool” helmer Tim Miller directing and both actors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton returning. The world was ready.
The result was a mixed bag. Though the reaction to the 2019 film decidedly improved on the prior two films, it was more on par with “Terminator 3” than the Cameron-directed first two movies. Speaking with Deadline recently whilst promoting “Avatar: The Way of Water,” Cameron reflected on the film’s failure and believes he’s figured out why it failed to work.
He admits he and Miller butted heads but says they’re still friends, and he’s “actually reasonably happy with the film”. However, he thinks there was too much reliance on the older stars, and the audience just didn’t care anymore:
“I think the problem, and I’m going to wear this one, is that I refused to do it without Arnold. Tim didn’t want Arnold, but I said, ‘Look, I don’t want that. Arnold and I have been friends for 40 years, and I could hear it, and it would go like this: ‘Jim, I can’t believe you’re making a Terminator movie without me.”
It just didn’t mean that much to me to do it, but I said, ‘If you guys could see your way clear to bringing Arnold back and then, you know, I’d be happy to be involved.’
Then Tim wanted Linda. I think what happened is I think the movie could have survived having Linda in it, I think it could have survived having Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she’s 60-something, he’s 70-something, all of a sudden it wasn’t your ‘Terminator’ movie, it wasn’t even your dad’s ‘Terminator’ movie, it was your granddad’s ‘Terminator’ movie. And we didn’t see that.
We loved it, we thought it was cool, you know, that we were making this sort of direct sequel to a movie that came out in 1991. And young moviegoing audiences weren’t born. They wouldn’t even have been born for another 10 years.”
Indeed box-office wise, “Terminator: Dark Fate” was a disaster – raking in just $261 million from a $190 million budget and losing the studio over $120 million – making it one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time and one of that year’s biggest disasters alongside the far worse received “Cats,” “Gemini Man” and “Dark Phoenix”. For now, the fate of the franchise looks grim.
