Terminator: Dark Fate - Cause we need another one of these apparently.

[BrunoMattei]

Self-explanatory

It's A BOMB!

Arnold delivering a beautiful one-liner...

www.youtube.com

Last Action Hero is underrated as fuck.

 

[Munchingonfish]

It's hard to see how a bunch of Hollywood types thought it was a good idea to spend $185 million on Dark Fate when no one liked Genisys. Mind you if you look here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_(franchise)#Box_office_performance

View attachment 994676

Genisys made $440 million worldwide on a budget of $155 million. Even if you double the budget to add in marketing costs, it looks like it made money. Maybe they think the same will happen with Dark Fate. Mind you if you assume marketing costs = budget, Terminator Salvation cost $400 million and so the worldwide gross of $371 million means it lost money.

The problem with Genisys was that its biggest market was China, where the studio gets a much smaller cut of the box office than anywhere else. Given how poorly fans and critics responded to it, they probably figured a direct sequel would completely fail.

China has no ties to these seniors, spics or Dylan Roof so they're not saving Dark Fate.

 

[Poe-Shen Zcela]

TBF he's kinda right here though. Every Terminator movie since T2 has been a bomb no matter what they do.

It isn't the same as Star Wars which went from printing money and ruling the toy isle for twenty years to bargain clearance after Disney got it's hands on it.

Yeah. Star Wars is a huge place (regardless of what Rich Evans says,) enough to tell two complete trilogies comfortably. Terminator, meanwhile, has That Terminator Plot that it just recycles over and over. Aliens is another series with that problem- as great as the gimmick is, you can only do so much with it before you start repeating yourself. While I don't think another good Terminator movie is impossible, it would have to walk the tightrope of not deviating from the Terminator formula too much while still feeling like it brought something new enough to be worth watching to the table.

Part of the problem here is that the time travel rules aren't really explained and don't make intuitive sense, so it tends to get tangled up in it's own dick when it comes to continuity. The first movie got away with it via stable time loop, the second fudged w/r/t the ripple effect but was open-ended enough that you could overlook it, but everything after that just gets confusing. And it's not like Doctor Who, where they can just say "timey-wimey ball" and move on, because time travel is basically the Stargate in that show- how they get to the monster of the week.

I partially agree. As far as Terminator goes the only things you could do is: either focus on the Future War or more time travel stories that don't rip off either Terminator 1 or 2. Maybe there's other ways Skynet can manifest? But it is limited.

Admittedly I'm arguing the case of a viable sequel to T2: a narrow target that never needed to be hit. That studios keep trying to do it again and again speaks to something being there: a core fanbase. Terminator's a classic Hollywood staple. It's not Star Wars, but it's nevertheless a household name with easily recognizable, nostalgic trappings: the basic plot, the music, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stan Winston's robots, etc. Whenever people talk about AI, it immediately brings to mind the Terminator and SkyNet, and the theme of being too connected to or relying too much on technology, to the point where either you become the product (a la The Matrix) or you become the target. There's also something to be said there about international relations and the looming threat of nuclear war.

I think what Terminator could use is a more refreshing, low-budget and cerebral angle. A break from the same attempts at outdoing T2's action set pieces and one-liners. Something a little more serious and speculative, perhaps, without being impenetrable or too esoteric. Terminator needs to be interesting again. Give us an inside look into DARPA, SAC-NORAD, the Cheyenne Mt complex, Silicon Valley robotics, etc. Show us where humanity was headed before SkyNet became self-aware, and what it had control of when it did. Or don't, and just put Terminator on ice forever. Maybe use the same exercises above to come up with a new, similar movie, something like Netflix's I Am Mother for instance.

Anyways, I just got back from watching Dark Fate. Review coming up in a bit.

 

[BrunoMattei]

This is the closest we'll ever get a true Terminator 3:

 

[Poe-Shen Zcela]

This is the closest we'll ever get a true Terminator 3:

I've never unironically enjoyed this more than I do now, in this time.

It's pretty much Prequel-tier trash. If George Lucas were given the rights to make Terminator films in the early 2000s, he would've made something like this. Everyone would've hated it, but it's so lovably silly and otherwise pretty faithful to T2 that I prefer it so much more than what we've gotten so far.

Speaking of that, here's my review of Terminator Dark Fate:

>me at the theatre

Strap in boys, it's gonna be a longmin'.

I went into this already knowing the movie was dreary and derivative, but in the interest of going out with friends and getting the full picture, I munched on some popcorn and just watched.

So the first thing I noticed is actually a positive: Tim and his team managed to be the first in 16 years to have a satisfying sound for the phased plasma rifles since T2. Good on you for that, Tim. I really liked that. The Terminators were obviously CG and moved like a CG robot would, so that was disappointing, but not as disappointing as the length of this future war scene. Easily the shortest of all opening Future War scenes since T2, ending for some reason on a Terminator about to shoot a little girl before cutting back to Sarah on a beach in Livingston, Guatemala. I've mostly heard people complement the CG work in recreating Sarah's and John's faces, but I always found them weird. Sarah's moreso than John's since her face is right up in the camera. I can tell that face isn't human, but whatever. The next thing I noticed is it seems Edward Furlong did have a single line in the film: "Hola, señorita. ¿Como estas?" he asked a girl at the bar. So hopefully he got a good paycheck for that. I've already expressed how I felt about this scene absolutely trashing T2 and effectively casting a shadow over this whole film, so I'll end this part by giving Sarah's backflip a 10.

That was 1998. Fast-forward 22 years to 2020, the year Trump gets impeached re-elected by a landslide and some MIC nutjob calling themselves Legion ignites 1000 EMPs in the atmo in retaliation. I'm getting ahead of myself. We're first introduced to Grace as she materializes inside a highway in Mexico and falls below it, to the horror of a young couple that were macking on top of their car. We see Grace zoom-and-enhance in bullet time, and after KO'ing the cops she walks right up to the guy that found her and matches her foot to his shoe before saying "Don't thank me yet" and taking his clothes. Elsewhere in Mexico City, we're introduced to Dani and her family on an average morning. Dani and her brother, I-Forgot-His-Name, say goodbye to their father and go to Arius Motors to work. Not a second after they leave, the REV-9 materializes right in the same apartment complex. After greeting one of the frightened residents like nothing happened, he casually morphs the shirt she's holding and then somehow makes his way to Dani's apartment. My friend caught this before I did: how did he find Dani's apartment so quickly? We don't see him ask anybody, and him appearing like he did, people should've called the cops on him--starting with the woman who first saw him, assuming he didn't murder her.

By the time the REV-9 makes it to Dani and tries to shoot her, we're only 15 minutes in. This was the first jarring thing about the film. We're used to a healthy amount of buildup before getting to this scene in the previous films, pre-Salvation; about 25-30 minutes before the big chase scene. But here, much less time is wasted before cutting to the chase. To me this just undercuts the film dramatically, not helped by the fact that we've seen much of the scene at Arius Motors & the highway chase already in preview and trailer footage. Unless you've been on a media blackout for this movie--no advertisement of any kind--you're not getting much from this that you didn't already get in the film's marketing. I should stop and mention, however, that I found Mackenzie Davis' performance quite enjoyable so far, except her power flex scene at the beginning & her overall just ripping off Kyle Reese.

She did pull off a neat little dodge-and-counter maneuver we didn't see in trailers while fighting the REV-9 at Arius Motors. However, at the highway scene, I was convinced up to this point that when she deflected the rebar thrown at her by the REV-9, she inadvertently impaled Dani's brother. I think what actually happened is the rebar embedded itself somewhere in front of the brother without impaling him, but when he lost control of the car and crashed into the highway barrier, the rebar bent and went right into his gut/liver. So, here's my suggestion: Grace is an enhanced human with drastically better reflexes, right? Have her catch the shitting rebar instead of deflecting it like a re:tard. It would've been nice to have the brother around, but I guess then it would've held back Dani's growth as a leader and female badass, so RIP brother I guess. You at least dropped a car engine on the REV-9.

Like it's been mentioned already, Sarah's entrance is several kinds of blatantly stupid. For as much as internet soyboys and Twitter shills might think the (white) male action hero is played-out and silly, they sure are willing to clap for the same exact thing (or worse) when there's a (white) female doing it, which probably comes off as really patronizing. Here's a TRoS meme I stole to express this sentiment.

I'm all for Alita: Battle Angel shit, but Linda's not cool and has never been an action hero. She's so far from it it's not funny, and it didn't need to be this way. It's so ridiculous. Also, why did she show up so late to either of these time displacement events? She mentioned about three of them: the first two were 2 years apart & shortly after John's murder, while the third was only a week prior to Dark Fate. For all of these, she was there as they materialized, whereupon she simply "destroyed them". How? With what? Each one of these instances could've been a movie in themselves. Did Tim and the gang forget how hard it is to kill one of these things? Were they all REV-9s? She made a point later about how "a T-800 from a future that no longer existed" killed her son, so the ones that appeared after 1998 couldn't have also been from SkyNet. She would've already dealt with the tentacle-monster Terminators by now if that's the case, so why is it any different this time? So many unanswered questions, but I doubt we're getting any comic books to answer them.

So our heroes jack her car and go get medicine for Grace, after which Sarah catches up to them and Grace conks out. They find a motel, administer the cocktail, and dump ice all over her. We have a moment where Dani mourns her family, lamenting that no one will be there to bury them. Sarah looks at her sympathetically and says, "Burials won't help them. Saying goodbye won't help you. You just have to movie on." Later Sarah explains who she is and what she's done, and the line from Grace about "you didn't change our fate" was cut out. When Grace asks her how she knew to be there on the highway today, Sarah abruptly ends the "interview" and says "we need to go" for no particular reason. When Grace pushes back on her for insisting she come along, Sarah delivers an astute rebuttal I thought was both interesting and relevant: we live in a society surveillance world. Cameras on every street pole and shop, yadda yadda, "you wouldn't last 10 hours". That was a good line and a good observation in the context of a Terminator film. Despite this, I still found it silly and convenient how the REV-9 taps into wires or a keyboard with his "future shit" goo to find them almost effortlessly, rather than the more believable methods employed by the T-800 and the T-1000. It all felt rushed and generic, like these details didn't really matter and they just wanted to justify why the REV-9 keeps finding them.

Grace continues to threaten this 60-year-old grandma while begrudgingly accepting her help, employing one or more variations of incidentally un-threatening tough guy statements like "Imma fuck you up" for much of this part of the film. Whether this was to justify an R rating, or simply because Tim Miller insisted on it as part of his brand, I'll leave up to you to decide. She does her future shit on Sarah's phone after getting her to spill the beans, and finds that the coordinates for the encrypted texts (how did she figure out the EXACT coordinates of encrypted messages?) are the same coordinates tattooed on her belly. This reminded me a lot of the scene from Genisys where "Pops" refused to tell Big Kyle & Lil' Sarah who sent him back, leaving an obvious [Insert Disk 22] sequel hook moment a la Yellow Yoda's refusal to tell Han where she got Anakin's lightsaber in TFA. To keep this review from getting much longer, I'll skip to where they get captured at border patrol.

Now, I think we all got the suggestion from this film that it's particular anti-wall & pro-illegal immigration from all the times they showed Gabriel Luna murdering the ICE agents. What they didn't show was when the REV-9 found himself going against the flow of illegal immigrants, whom Grace freed while looking for Dani. What does he do to them? Nothing, of course. He just superhero-leaps over them onto the cage and crawls like Spider-Man toward where Grace and Dani went, which is where he started slaughtering the ICE agents. Wonder why he didn't just jump over them too, or landed ahead of them from atop the cage and closer to Dani & Grace? Real head-scratcher. Since he clearly didn't care about getting made, he could've also just split in two and left the agents grappling with his other half while he caught up to his two unarmed targets (Sarah was armed with a pistol but separated & straggling at this point).

I just realized that this scene is probably Tim's answer to the police massacre scene from T1, and if it is, oh laddie. You're gonna have to try harder than that.

So they finally get to Carl's cabin in Laredo, Texas, and we get to probably one of the better parts of the film, relatively speaking. I enjoyed Linda's performance when she first laid eyes on Carl, the one who murdered her son. Good job all around. Her brief dialogue with Dani in the yard afterward was poignant as well: "I don't have a photograph of John. I never took any. I ... thought that if I didn't, they would never find him. But now I can't even remember his face." This played better on screen than it reads, considering how much this entire movie shits all over John and T2, so for what it's worth it's a pretty good scene. Better than Sarah's bitterness toward Carl when they finally speak. Overall I liked Arnold's performance throughout the rest of the film, moreso than I expected. He easily carried the film from this point on. His "Do you believe in fate, Sarah" dialogue, wherein he framed Sarah's act of killing SkyNet as freeing him, came off pretty well said. I'd say it deserved to be in a better film. This was after she shot him in the chest three times, in response to his reason for sending her the texts: "to give John's death meaning." Ooof, man. You can't sell that line to me after how this film started. There was absolutely no fucking meaning to it other than money and an agenda-based power trip.

Skipping ahead to the EMP acquisition scene: the EMP was an excuse to have the big C5 plane chase. The major that gives it to Sarah is there to take a bullet and then piss off safely as he facilitates their escape. This is the big action set piece Tim's been hyping up, and for what it's worth, I'd say it's better than the big SanFran bridge scene the chopper chase in Genisys. It's also heavily derivative of the tanker chase from T2, right down to the REV-9 crashing a chopper and then commandeering a bigger vehicle (which he pulled out of his ass) before they all crash at the steel mill hydroelectric dam (sEe ItS nOt MoLtEn StEeL tHiS tImE gUyS iTs WaTeR lol). Anyways, watching the T-800 fight the REV-9 here is the coolest action of the movie, purely because it's Arnold / the T-800 we know and love just exchanging blows with the REV-9 and trying to keep it from Dani. I enjoyed it, especially the big DANUN DUN DANUN scene where the T-800 swipes the revolving grenade launcher before the REV-9 could and blows the stuck bay doors open. Solid shots, Tim, and well-timed with the iconic (albeit often misused) Terminator theme. You knew what you were doing there and did right.

So everybody crashes downstream of the dam and then resurface later to meet inside the turbine room. This is where the REV-9 tries to reason with his prey:

REV-9: "Give me the girl."
T-800: "No."
REV-9: "You really should, though. We were both made by similar futures."
T-800: "I was made by SkyNet. That future failed."
REV-9: "This girl is foreign to you. Why don't you just let me have her?"
Sarah: "Because we're not machines, you metal motherfucker."

Imagine this being in a Deus Ex game or an early Fallout game and the idea of this happening sounds a lot better in concept. As it is, I don't know why he wasted its time if he wasn't stalling to let his other half get a sniper shot on Dani. Plus Sarah's parroting of another classic Reese line is superfluous, dramatically poor and ineffective. I guess Reese also amounted to a nobody or another dead guy in this timeline, unless that rumor about him being responsible for the enhanced soldier program was true, painting him as a dubious bad guy in a time of war. I'll bet they were going for that until they realized it was too on-the-nose and took it out.

Final fight scene: Team Dani is super-well coordinated for having done nothing but a little target practice for Dani. I think she rightly let the others fight while she hung back; I honestly don't remember if she even had a weapon at this point. I think Grace stole the show for most of this fight, while Sarah doing anything but staying by Dani's side and keeping her away from the REV-9 seemed unbelievably dumb. Fortunately she had thick whamen-grade plot armor that kept the REV-9 from decapitating her. The only thing I remember about Arnie up to this point was him effortlessly hurling the REV-9 endo up one story onto a scaffolding, which was re;tarded. The REV-9's gotta weigh a couple hundred pounds or something; it's not a featherweight ragdoll, even for a T-800.

Final final fight scene: I don't understand how getting smacked around in the giant turbine "killed" the REV-9's future super-goo half. At first it looked like it was melting off the endo after it emerged and threw Sarah aside, then it started hardening, forcing it to break the coating before it could move again. Of course, this was to buy time for Dani to tearfully pull Grace's power source out of her belly, and this leads into the biggest, most embarrassing "women-empowerment" scene I've witnessed in modern cinema. It might be worse than the female A-Team shot from Endgame, I dunno. But she picks up the shotgun and fires the last remaining slugs into the REV-9, causing it to stagger back in dramatic fashion. This is supposed to be really cool and awesome, except for the fact that the REV-9 has already been severely crippled and missing an arm at least. So after she runs out of ammo, she starts swinging the shotgun at it, before tackling it to the ground and trying to jam the power core into its eye. I'm not sure what else I expected to happen in this scene--Grace is dead, Sarah's unconscious, and somehow the T-800 was incapacitated from the turbine explosion--but throwing yourself at a machine that wants nothing more than to rip your throat out seems worthy of a Darwin Award. Reminder that this is Tim's parallel to the scene in T2 where Sarah pumps the T-1000 with her last shotgun shells.

So of course the REV-9 gets the upper hand and starts to choke her. Sarah comes to and yells to the T-800 to wake up and help Dani. Even if I didn't have this spoiled ahead of time, I would've spotted this moment a mile away. She has to call him Carl to wake him up. This may simply be just how he configured himself to respond to his family whenever he "sleeps" (if at all), or it may just be dramatic bullshit. Either way, he wakes up and pulls the REV-9's arm off of Dani, allowing her to jam the power core into its eye. The T-800 pulls him over the side of a pit of some sort with a platform 10-20 feet down. They both fall and get impaled on pipes; the REV-9 tries to pull itself free and the T-800 holds it down. As the power cell reacts, the REV-9 desperately tears at the T-800's flesh on its arm, and soon the reactions begin burning the skin off at an accelerated rate. This is where we get our final "For John" moment, and it came off dumber and more cheesy than I expected. I think it was worse than the "Protect my Sarah" moment in Genisys. We also get shots of Sarah and Dani looking down into the pit, mirroring 1-1 the ending to T2. No thumbs up this time, just the power cell exploding and fusing their endoskeletons to the platform. We do get the T-800 shutdown sequence as in T2, though.

So that's it. Another deleted timeline for the trash heap of post-T2 sequels. The only thing this latest iteration excelled at was its level of disrespect to both the audience and the first two films. Genisys was plenty disrespectful, but I think Dark Fate took it a step further in a bumbling attempt to seem more respectful. If you're just going to kill John and replace him while billing yourself as "the true sequel to T2", why should any of us care about your new characters? Anyways, thank you for reading, and goodnight.

The music sucked too.

EDIT #27: How could I forget Arnie's iconic line in this movie: "I won't be back." This is part of his answer to Dani when she asked what he told his family after they left the cabin for good. It's also the most appropriate prediction for this franchise's future.

 

[Ahriman]

[Extremely long and thorough review]

Thank you for your service, sounds just as terrible as I imagined.

 

[Perpetual Outrage]

Genisys made $440 million worldwide on a budget of $155 million. Even if you double the budget to add in marketing costs, it looks like it made money. Maybe they think the same will happen with Dark Fate. Mind you if you assume marketing costs = budget, Terminator Salvation cost $400 million and so the worldwide gross of $371 million means it lost money.

I don't want this to be too dickish but this really gets my goat. I hate when people just go to wikipedia and look at gross / budget and think they know the success of a movie. You at least knew that budget didn't include marketing but you don't seem to know that a movie's gross does not include the movie theater's cut, which in general, is around 50% of the gross but varies based on the contracts the theaters have with that studio.

Studios negotiate with the theaters over the cut, but in general is handled like this (Studio/Theater)

-First weekend 90/10 (This is why you're always seeing news reports about how much a movie made in its first weekend or week, because it's when the studio makes the most)
-Second week 75/25
-Third week 50/50
-Fourth week 25/75

This is the reason you will sometimes see a movie in a theater way too long, it's because the theater is trying to earn its money since they just had thousands of people showing up the first week fucking up their theater with the wear and tear while the theater itself was making very, very little money. You referenced an RLM video up above so I'm assuming you also saw their video about "box office numbers" awhile back. They completely forgot about the theater's cut and put up an annotation saying so at the beginning of the video, after I and probably other nerds mocked them for it (one of the very few mistakes they ever make)

Also, foreign box office gross, ESPECIALLY China cannot be trusted AT ALL. They are essentially whatever the theater wants to report. A big example of this is when the movie Warcraft came out and the Chinese numbers were insane, until you looked at it more than surface level. They had theaters that were destroyed in floods reporting as being full audiences for weeks.

Here's a source for that: https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/21/media/china-box-office-crackdown/?iid=EL

Hopefully this doesn't come across as too dickish or power leveling, but I went to uni for film and just hate seeing people misuse gross/budget.

Also, AIIIIIIIIIIIIDS

 

[Gustav Schuchardt]

I don't want this to be too dickish but this really gets my goat. I hate when people just go to wikipedia and look at gross / budget and think they know the success of a movie. You at least knew that budget didn't include marketing but you don't seem to know that a movie's gross does not include the movie theater's cut, which in general, is around 50% of the gross but varies based on the contracts the theaters have with that studio.

Also, foreign box office gross, ESPECIALLY China cannot be trusted AT ALL. They are essentially whatever the theater wants to report. A big example of this is when the movie Warcraft came out and the Chinese numbers were insane, until you looked at it more than surface level. They had theaters that were destroyed in floods reporting as being full audiences for weeks.

Now that I didn't know. So Genisys, a film that is literally a worse crime against humanity than the Holocaust, didn't make money? And all those flops Hollywood claims made money because they were big in China probably didn't make money either? That's the best news I've had all week!

Maybe this is the wrong question to ask but is there a rule of thumb to work out if a movie made money? E.g. if I double the budget to include marketing costs and halve the gross to take out the studio cut is that a decent first approximation for profitability?

 

[Perpetual Outrage]

Maybe this is the wrong question to ask but is there a rule of thumb to work out if a movie made money? E.g. if I double the budget to include marketing costs and halve the gross to take out the studio cut is that a decent first approximation for profitability?

Yep, general rule of thumb is to take the budget and double it to include marketing, then halve the gross. This works for the majority of movies but not for things like Marvel movies where they spend way more on marketing than what's considered normal.

If you really have a hate boner for certain movies like Genisys, which is definitely understandable, you can follow its reported income as it ages through a few different sites or even just wiki if you check it once a week to see the change in gross. Just know that the longer it's in the theater that means it's less money the studio is making from it.

An easy example is Avengers Endgame, where they kept it in the theater to go after the all time record but added that terrible, terrible CGI Hulk scene. Most people were shocked by it, except people who understood what was going on. Marvel wasn't going to spend any real money on that CGI because by that point they were getting around 10% of the ticket sales. They just wanted the record.

There are outliers that don't go by the rules (theaters in heavily affluent neighborhoods have stronger negotiations with the studios) but overall the studios purposely try to keep it confusing because it helps them maintain 'brand health', i.e. hiding that their IP is failing, dead, etc.

 

[Manwithn0n0men]

Terminator: Dark Fate - Movie Review

Chris Stuckmann reviews Terminator: Dark Fate, starring Linda Hamilton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Gabriel Luna, Diego Boneta. Di...

www.youtube.com

Now that I didn't know. So Genisys, a film that is literally a worse crime against humanity than the Holocaust, didn't make money? And all those flops Hollywood claims made money because they were big in China probably didn't make money either? That's the best news I've had all week!

According to noted Shill reviewer Scott Mendleson only a handfull of movies needed China to make a profit.

Unless the film is a co-production, has a major Chinese investor or has some other deal prior to release, the studios get around 25% of the ticket price from China, versus over/under 50% from everywhere else. So, while the marketplace is often, by far, the biggest overseas territory for a given movie, it merely acts to help already huge movies get to flashier and more boast-worthy global totals. If a big movie like Star Trek Beyond stumbles around the world, a $60 million Chinese gross isn’t going to save it. Conversely, with a few exceptions (xXx: Return of Xander Cage and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, both of which cost between $40 million and $85 million, come to mind), no “big” movies that have become big hits solely because of a “Chinese bailout

 

[Cod of War]

 

[Perpetual Outrage]

No Scientist Man or Jay in a comically oversized coat? Unsubscribe!

 

[Ahriman]

Oh shit, I totally missed this -- I was just about to post this article.

Box Office: ‘Terminator’ Bombs Again As ‘Dark Fate’ Nabs Apocalyptic $10.6 Million Friday

Even with James Cameron and Linda Hamilton reuniting with Arnold Schwarzenegger in an R-rated sequel which stole from the 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' playbook, 'Terminator: Dark Fate' once again failed to avoid Judgment Day.

www.forbes.com

http://archive.li/17jp0

Terminator has become a metaphor for itself, with filmmakers trying different things only to face the same outcome: Judgment Day is inevitable. Hollywood may yet figure out that audiences who aren’t die-hard sci-fi geeks have little interest in additional Terminator movies. Making a “future war” sequel with Christian Bale as John Connor didn’t do it. Making a time-twisting retcon, presumably modeled after Star Trek, didn’t do it. Bringing back the old gang for a passing-the-torch sequel like Star Wars: The Force Awakens didn’t do it. The pitches change, the hooks differ, but the result is always the same. Just because folks liked The Terminator in 1984 and lost their minds over Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991 does not mean they have any interest in additional Terminator movies. Just because something was once popular doesn’t mean audiences care for a new iteration.

And this one:

The sheer hubris, to try to convince audiences three times in a row to want something that they clearly don’t want, at great expense, is frankly appalling. The “this time folks will bite” attitude is what has left theatrical moviegoing in grave peril as streaming and television networks have filled the gap for something beyond cover records of yesterday’s former glories. It is one thing to try a reboot, strike out and move on. It is another thing to pull solid grosses but at too high a cost, like Sony’s Amazing Spider-Man, and then team with a rival and keep the budget in check for the second reboot. It is another entirely to take the same dead franchise and presume that the same audiences who said “No, thank you” not once but twice will somehow magically embrace it on the third try.

That was ruthless. I don't even know where my sides are anymore

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

I don't think audiences really don't want or like Terminator any more, I do think it's just become such a clusterfuck that people are fed up with how the brand is handled, not so much the brand itself.

Dark Fate might have worked out for audiences had Salvation and Genysis not existed, but they unfortunately do.

The effect is the same though: The brand is in the gutter, it has been run into the ground.

 

[Ahriman]

 

[Commander X]

Wow, it bombed? Who knew it would, what with it's barely being marketed besides the trumpeting of how it features STRAHNK WAHMEN, and the usual "ha ha look at all of the MANBABIES who are SCARED of STRONG WAHMEN" garbage.

 

[Commander X]

This is the closest we'll ever get a true Terminator 3:

What is striking is how mediocre and toothless all these films that followed Terminator and Terminator 2 are. You can't even take the Terminators seriously, they're like characters from a Saturday morning cartoon. The Arnold in Terminator and even Terminator 2 as the "good guy" is foreboding; that scene where John realizes suddenly he has to stop him from killing those two guys he just wanted to mess with is a fantastic scene. In all these newer films the violence is the same overly CGI'ed weightless violence that totally lacks in any visceral-ness and Arnold is cracking lame jokes in between overly CGI'ed fights with some TOTALLY NEW AND MENACING model of Terminator that isn't even a tenth as menacing as Robert Patrick running after a car.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Wow, it bombed? Who knew it would, what with it's barely being marketed besides the trumpeting of how it features STRAHNK WAHMEN, and the usual "ha ha look at all of the MANBABIES who are SCARED of STRONG WAHMEN" garbage.

"Haha, look at these manbabies, being scared of STRANG WAHMANZ, these losers! Can't handle a bit of not being in the limelight! This is absolutely groundbreaking, we've never seen such strong female lead characters EVER before! Of course these crybabies whining about their childhood being ruined will just piss themselves and take their money elsewh- ... wait... Joker made HOW MUCH MONEY?!"

What is striking is how mediocre and toothless all these films that followed Terminator and Terminator 2 are. You can't even take the Terminators seriously, they're like characters from a Saturday morning cartoon. The Arnold in Terminator and even Terminator 2 as the "good guy" is foreboding; that scene where John realizes suddenly he has to stop him from killing those two guys he just wanted to mess with is a fantastic scene. In all these newer films the violence is the same overly CGI'ed weightless violence that totally lacks in any visceral-ness and Arnold is cracking lame jokes in between overly CGI'ed fights with some TOTALLY NEW AND MENACING model of Terminator that isn't even a tenth as menacing as Robert Patrick running after a car.

The problem is that they want to copy Marvel's style of grand, outlandish action sequences. But that's not Terminator. Terminator isn't really about doing flips and stunts and shit - at least not the kind you'd see in Iron Man. The Terminator has to be something that gets slammed by a truck going 70mph and shrug that off without even limping, but he doesn't have to do kicks and flips while doing so.

Contrast modern Action sequences with the impact of the killing scenes in Joker. When Arthur stabs his former co-worker with scissors, you can't help but whince, since it feels very grounded and realistic.
Terminator movies should try to do that. You need to contrast the vulnerability of a normal human person with the invulnerability of the Terminator. Sure, it looks neat when two superhuman characters beat each other up with sledgehammers, but does that really carry any impact on the viewer?

 

[Gustav Schuchardt]

Sure, it looks neat when two superhuman characters beat each other up with sledgehammers, but does that really carry any impact on the viewer?

The Terminator franchise has had that problem since T2. If you've got two bulletproof robots shooting each other for two hours, where is the tension?

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

In all these newer films the violence is the same overly CGI'ed weightless violence that totally lacks in any visceral-ness and Arnold is cracking lame jokes in between overly CGI'ed fights with some TOTALLY NEW AND MENACING model of Terminator that isn't even a tenth as menacing as Robert Patrick running after a car.

In a trivial defense of these movies, Robert Patrick is a tough act to follow. I don't know if this has been posted before, but it's a few clips talking about the casting of the T-1000:

Back when Cameron gave a shit, he put real effort into making sure that the T-1000 was a different kind of threat. I do think a more agile Terminator would work, but you'd need to cast Ray Park or someone who can actually do the stunts in order to avoid the schizophrenic cuts and CGI orgy that are required when you've got stuntmen jumping in every three seconds.