The terrible truth of franchise movie making is that not every great idea can sustain an endless string of profitable annual cinematic outings. Just because something worked once or even twice doesn’t mean studios can use its iconography to secure their revenue for the next ten years. Sometimes a story outside of its bounds ruins what was once good about it.
the terminator and T2: Judgment Day are great movies that can lead an uninformed observer to believe that there are infinite possibilities in those concepts. Repeated messy attempts to capitalize on their success have proven that claim to be false. The final tricky sequel came with some controversial thoughts from the director.
Terminator: Dark Fate is the latest entry in the long-running franchise, and it can be a wound that takes a long time to heal. The sequel was canceled almost immediately, lagging behind its predecessor at the box office and receiving mixed to negative reviews. It’s fair to say it’s not up to the quality of the first few movies, but it’s better than the movies that followed. Director Tim Miller, late from Deadpool, has come out to discuss the film’s disappointing outcome and has put much of the blame on his own feet. Studios learning the wrong lesson from box office failure is a time-honored tradition right now, but as a filmmaker, Miller sees its failure as a lesson. Those who own the rights to the franchise would do well to do the same.
While there was undoubtedly some hatred specifically aimed at dark fate before release, the film limped into the race thanks to its franchise’s back-to-back disasters. The film received a lot of criticism for daring to have more than one woman in it, as is so often the case with geek media, but that vocal part of the fanbase did little to kill the film. dark fate set himself the frankly absurd goal of acting as a sequel to the first and second Terminator movies without acknowledging the other three or the two seasons of TV. James Cameron was one of the five writers credited, while modern reports suggest he played a more involved role in the film. Their goal, as it always has been, is to erase the memory of anything that didn’t work and go back to the two movies that people like. This is seen as a return to form, but it doesn’t understand what made the early films special.
Terminator: Genisys is a considerably weaker film than dark fate, but it brought in quite a bit more money. It’s hard to argue with the quality when considering a movie that was immediately made non-canon by the sequel. That feels like a pretty open tone of acceptance of a film’s narrative inadequacy. When it was promoted, James Cameron was challenged for the ads. Cameron didn’t work on the film, but the audience that went to watch Furious 7 or Mad Max: Fury Road probably heard the legendary director sing the mild praise of Genisys for their movie. Infamously stating, “I’m starting to see things I recognized,” and inadvertently summed up the entire problem with the franchise since 2003.
Back to ‘s story T2 solves nothing. Declaring a movie as non-canon doesn’t erase it retroactively from the real timeline. Everyone still saw those bad movies and lost all the goodwill they ever had for the franchise. Everyone still had the creeping suspicion that there were no more good ideas. The studio wants to go back to T2 because T2 made a lot of money and became an icon, so they keep forcing good directors to put a limited spin on the same idea. When fans say they want the franchise to go back to what it was, they don’t just mean they want to erase the previous movies from the timeline. They want the simplicity and creative vision of the franchise’s early days. The first two films are good because the primary goal of the team behind their production was quality. The other movies are bad because they put the quality way behind the continuity obsession and lazy financially focused callback oriented cinema. A return form for the Terminator franchise would be a simple, straight forward horror or action movie built around high concept science fiction and real human drama.
Undoubtedly the best way forward for the Terminator franchise would be to hire a team of complete newcomers and go through the movies like an autopsy to put together what’s worth preserving. A good movie star, a good director, good writers, a good crew and a good idea make a good movie, regardless of the title. The Terminator franchise deserves more than ever-boring updates from a movie everyone knew was good 30 years ago. Either let new creatives find interesting new directions without the burden of continuity, or let the franchise die the peaceful death it’s been hoping for since the 2000s.
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