By After multiple failed attempts to capture the magic without James Cameron’s involvement, hitting a nadir with the widely panned “Terminator: Genisys,” the “Terminator” franchise needed a boost in the arm.
The result was “Terminator: Dark Fate,” a film that adopted the “Halloween” 2018 template of a legacy sequel that ignored the events of the other sequels past T2 and got James Cameron back – albeit as producer only.
Tim Miller directed and both actors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton returned to their roles for the film. Though the reaction improved upon the prior two films, the response was still tepid.
Speaking with Empire recently, Cameron says he believes he’s figured out why the film failed to work and puts much of the blame on himself. Even so, he remains proud of the film’s villain Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna):
“I think the Rev-9 was cool as s—. Personally, I think that’s as good as anything that we did back then. Our problem was not that the film didn’t work. The problem was, people didn’t show up. I’ve owned this to Tim Miller many times. I said, I torpedoed that movie before we ever wrote a word or shot a foot of film’.”
He said the problem was the film was being sold in a way to appeal to older generations without offering younger ones something new to latch onto:
“We achieved our goal. We made a legit sequel to a movie where the people that were actually going to theatres at the time that movie came out are all either dead, retired, crippled, or have dementia. It was a non-starter. There was nothing in the movie for a new audience.”
Despite having “miscalculated the whole thing,” he still thinks the film is ‘cracking’ and is a “solid third” in the franchise behind his own two.
“Terminator: Dark Fate” pulled in just $261 million from a $190 million budget and lost the studio over $120 million – making it one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time.
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