Conceived as a semi-reboot of a legendary saga supposed to relaunch it at the box office, “Terminator Dark Fate” was a cruel failure at the Box Office. And may well sound the death knell for a franchise that we thought was indestructible…
In October 2020, Terminator Dark Fate was released on our screens with the firm intention of winning back fans disappointed by recent installments of the franchise, and particularly a Terminator: Genisys disavowed in person by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
On paper everything seemed to be off to a good start with the appointment as director of Tim Miller, then just crowned with the international success of Deadpool while James Cameron was announced to be back as creative supervisor; the filming of the next episodes of Avatar not allowing him to free himself to make this new Terminator himself.
As a reminder, Terminator Dark Fate, the sixth feature film in the franchise, is not the sequel to the previous installments, but the direct extension of Terminator 2 (the final opus directed by James Cameron in 1991). Therefore it erases from the official chronology of the saga the Terminator 3, Terminator Renaissance and Terminator Genisys therefore, all disavowed – to varying degrees – by the public.
A noble intention therefore, which offered Dark Fate the more comfortable position of not having to make a link with unloved episodes, but also the counterpart of having to offer a result up to Terminator 2still considered to this day as a monument of the genre and one of the best sequels ever produced in the history of cinema.
However, the result did not live up to expectations, and that is an understatement. As soon as the first teaser was unveiled, the enthusiasm born at the announcement of the project waned, the fault of an action-packed trailer and spectacular scenes stuffed with coarse slow motion, a far cry from the film stripped of green screens supposed to reconnect with the origins of the franchise as promised by Tim Miller before starting the production of the film.
Twentieth Century Fox
Even before its release, there seemed to be no longer any doubt that Terminator Dark Fate would not be good, and rumors have even claimed that Disney, distributor of the film after the takeover of 20th Century Fox, decided to “sacrifice” the film by operating the most minimalist promotional campaign possible.
Pessimistic impressions then confirmed by the poor scores of the film at the box office. Ironically, Tim Miller’s film also brought in less money at the end of its run than the previous parts that the filmmaker had not hesitated to describe as “d**dic” in the interview he had with us. granted during our visit to the set of the film in Budapest.
Failing to save the franchise, Terminator Dark Fate threw her into the grave. But how to explain such a commercial and artistic shipwreck, since the film was indeed not good, as evidenced by its audience rating on AlloCiné of 2.6/5, for example? A first element of response is linked to the creative tensions that opposed the filmmaker to his producer James Cameron.
If he personally took steps to put his franchise back on track, James Cameron could hardly get down to the making of the film himself, since he was already involved in the filming of the next two parts of Avatar.
By choosing Tim Miller to replace him, the Canadian filmmaker thought he had found the right solution, even if the two men would have had to share the same vision of history, which was not the case. Shortly after the release of the film, Tim Miller did not hesitate to come back to this somewhat chaotic shoot, saying on this occasion that he would never work with James Cameron again.
Twentieth Century Fox
“The things viewers liked the least about the movie were things I had no control over. I can’t help it if you didn’t like Genisys or felt betrayed by Terminator 4 , it is not my fault.
Although Jim (Cameron) and David Ellison are the producers of the film, which gives them the final cut, I am still credited in the credits as the director. And although the battle is a losing one, I still feel compelled to fight to preserve the quality of the film because that’s what a director is supposed to do: fight for his films.” he notably declared to our colleagues from HollywoodReporter in November 2019.
According to him, the main concern of the film would be linked to its vision diametrically opposed to that of the two producers but according to Linda Hamilton, the interpreter of Sarah Connor, this failure would rather be the consequence of the scenario.
In an interview with the American site The AV Clubthe 63-year-old actress at the time denounced the absence of a complete script at the start of production, even arguing that the film would have been written as the filming progressed despite the consistency of the ‘plot :
“The script wasn’t quite finished when we started and it was being written as we went along. And we all found it very difficult to work like this. A lot of people told me that that’s how we make movies now. But I need a beginning, a middle and an end.”
Twentieth Century Fox
With an improvised scenario being filmed and conflicts between the director and the production of the film, we better understand the industrial disaster that was Terminator Dark Fate and why it seems unlikely that the saga will resurface in the near future; at least as long as Disney has the rights to the saga.
It now remains to be seen whether James Cameron will try again to rehabilitate the license by setting himself this time to the realization of a seventh opus or if the lessons of the four (!) consecutive failures have now convinced him that the Terminator franchise belongs to the past and – in the case of its first two installments – to the pantheon of cinematic history.
In a post-mortem exercise, very late moreover, James Cameron spoke on the subject last December, at the microphone of the site Deadlinewhile he was in the midst of promoting Avatar 2. And said he was quite willing to take his share of the responsibility for the company’s fiasco, which still caused the Twentieth Century to lose nearly $120 million. Fox.
“I think the problem is with me, because I refused to do it without Arnold [Schwarzenegger]. Tim didn’t want [de lui], but I said, ‘Look, I don’t want this. Arnold and I have been friends for 40 years and I could hear him from here saying, “Jim, I can’t believe you’re making a Terminator movie without me.”
He added: “I think what happened is the movie could have survived with Linda, or it could have survived with Arnold. But when you put Linda and Arnold together, she’s in her 60s, he’s in his 70s. , suddenly it’s not your Terminator movie anymore. It wasn’t even your dad’s. It was Grandpa Terminator, and we haven’t seen it.”