Action-Adventure Terminator: Dark Fate

I'll be shocked if this flop doesn't put the franchise on ice for at least 10 years. T3-Dark Fate has failed in every way compared to the first two films with Dark Fate already doing the worst out of them all in the box office and is just critically decent .

Salvation and Genisys were also planned as a trilogy but they didn't get continuations of their stories. I don't see this getting a direct sequel either
 
I agree but if/when the franchise continues, could a Jericho or Walking Dead type show work? Like center a show around survivors as the original judgement day happens in 1997 with the series finale having a time jump to 2029.

I would of course prefer a future war film or show set in the first two film's 2029 but I don't see it happening and so I guess the closest would be a show like I mentioned

Depends on what your view of Terminator is. Is it about the robots? Mankind’s survival? Or is really just about Arnold and Linda? They had a good story that got a great sequel that closed the loop. This franchise didn’t really seem ripe for world building but they keep trying to.
 
At this point I think is time to put the franchise to sleep. They've done every possible iteration of the idea, from setting it on Judgment Day (T3), setting it in the future (Salvation), in between (Genisys) and even an alternate timeline (Dark Fate). None of them seemed to stick quite like the first two. There's nothing left to do.



They haven't done the "Star trek; First Contact" type of storyline. Going back further in the past and killing the decendants/historical figures

Imagine a Terminator movie set in the 1800's?
 
Here's why the plot of the movie doesn't work:

Basically, the prologue sets up the idea that John Connor was not a savior and not necessary to defeat Skynet. That basically means the whole idea of, we have to protect such and such person to preserve humanity's victory int he future is basically pointless. So, if humanity or the resistance didn't need John Connor to protect the future from Terminators or Skynet, then the human resistance doesn't need Dani either to save humans from Legion. They basically have to just do what they did in the second film, prevent Legion from happening.

How are we supposed to be invested in saving or protecting Dani, if that's not really the crucial event that matters? If you can undo a possible post-apocalyptic future in other ways, without John or Dani, then their survival is not crucial to protect or ensure the future.

So explain something to me.

If John is dead, and a new leader came up and led the fight anyway, then why is he still needed? John was not crucial to stopping Judgement Day or Skynet. His survival was irrelevant.

The key to stopping Nu-Judgement Day from Legion is NOT Dani. They simply need to take steps to stop it.
I think you're missing the point of Legion/Skynet. What I got from the movie is that no matter how you stop Skynet or Legion or whatever, the AI apocalypse is going to happen regardless. The idea behind it is fine, it's just the execution is what a lot of people have a problem with. In the context with the real world, it makes sense. There is no stopping man's innovation of technology, and man don't want to stop. Eventually there will come a time when that tech comes back and bites us in the ass. That's the point of all this. It's inevitable. They stopped Skynet, and something else took it's place. Just because you stop one company from going down that road, that doesn't mean all technological progress stops, and if progress doesn't stop, it will just lead to this same conclusion again. If Tesla never existed in the real world, it would just be some other company that's going to jumpstart the electric car trend. Even if they stop Legion, they'll delay judgement day by another decade maybe, but in that time, someone else will continue that work to bring humanity and tech to that same peak again where judgement day happens. As long as humans innovate technology, judgement day is unavoidable.

In regards to John, I see his fate thematically tied to Skynet since the first film. The whole idea was to prevent his birth/ascension/survival, etc. so humans don't win. With Skynet finally dead, I wasn't all that surprised that John bites it with one last **** you from Skynet. And now that we have Legion, a new leader is brought up in the form of Dani. So it's not so much that John Connor was pointless, but more so that a John Connor-like role is crucial for humanity's survival, it just doesn't necessarily have to be John Connor who fills it, since it's a different apocalypse from Skynet now. I'd even go as far as to say the ONLY person that really matters is Sarah Connor, because she seems to be fated to be the mother/teacher of whatever new resistance leader that's supposed to rise up to deal with whatever future that ends up happening.

Personally, I feel this is a good way to close out the "trilogy" that started from T1 to T2 and now this. Since judgement day is unavoidable, the best possible course of action to take is, as Sarah puts it, prepare for it. A film about the future battle wouldn't carry much weight to me, aside from seeing the stories that builds up to a certain point where the loop closes, because whether it's Skynet or Legion, the whole idea is that the humans win in the end, that's why the machines wanna change time to kill whoever leader before they can lead them to victory. At the end of the day, judgement day will come, and humans still win in the end. It just comes with the cost of billions of lives before that, and them trying to save those billions just pushes judgement day to a later date, so they might as well just bite the bullet and go through it. And that seems to be what Sarah and Dani are planning to do. It's a nihilistic view, but it makes the most sense to me. So it's a nice send off to the story that started in T1. Again, that's me personally, so feel free to disagree.
 
The sad thing is I’m 100% certain we were all saying these exact same things four years ago after Genysis came out and here we are. Question, was Genysis financially profitable despite everything?

Uh, yeah, I think it was somewhat succesful. It cost less to make than TDF, and made like $440 million worldwide, $100 million in China alone. So it made decent coin, but it wasn't enough to continue that iteration. Besides, critics and fans hated it.
 
They haven't done the "Star trek; First Contact" type of storyline. Going back further in the past and killing the decendants/historical figures

Imagine a Terminator movie set in the 1800's?

There’d be a slew of John Connors in the past.

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I think if this were to continue it needs to be a total revamp. Stop trying to recreate Cameron's work. Stop with the cheesy callbacks. Just create a brand new story around the central premise of an AI uprising. Someone suggested doing a story where it turns out Skynet was leading the actual rebellion and the humans had become tyrants. I think you could do that as a followup to the original two films.

Decades, or maybe even a century or two after humanity won the war against the machines, humanity has completely subjugated AI. So now you have these former Terminators and all of these machines serving as slaves while still developing their humanity. And they're growing this underground network due to this shared suffering. Meanwhile, on the human side, the now-deceased Connors have become these messianic figures who've been corrupted over time.

The only way to move Terminator forward in my mind is to literally move the story forward. Like way forward.
 
I just saw it. It wasn't bad, rather aggressively mediocre. It didn't really bring anything to the table that we haven't seen before. That being said, I thought McKenzie Davis did a pretty good job and it was nice to see Linda Hamilton back as Sarah, but besides that I wasn't really impressed. Arnold's return would have had a greater impact if Genisys was never a thing.
I'll be shocked if this flop doesn't put the franchise on ice for at least 10 years. T3-Dark Fate has failed in every way compared to the first two films with Dark Fate already doing the worst out of them all in the box office and is just critically decent .

Salvation and Genisys were also planned as a trilogy but they didn't get continuations of their stories. I don't see this getting a direct sequel either
They should just let the franchise rest. They have never been able to come close to T1 or T2 and they never will. Every sequel since T2 has been some sort of rehash besides Salvation. They have to end it.
 
They haven't done the "Star trek; First Contact" type of storyline. Going back further in the past and killing the decendants/historical figures

Imagine a Terminator movie set in the 1800's?

I'm partial to the 1920's.

 
They haven't done the "Star trek; First Contact" type of storyline. Going back further in the past and killing the decendants/historical figures

Imagine a Terminator movie set in the 1800's?
Right, but the kinda did that in Genisys when a Terminator was send back to a time when Sarah Connor was a child. Like a lot of stuff in that film, they did have a lot of potentially interesting ideas but they wasted all of them.
 
I will say it’s nice to see T3 get a retrospective love. Was always an under rated movie for me and probably the best of all the sequels to T2.
 
I will say it’s nice to see T3 get a retrospective love. Was always an under rated movie for me and probably the best of all the sequels to T2.

Where is it getting love? It's often sh*t on and most franchise ranking videos I've seen on youtube has it as last or 2nd to last with Genisys. Don't think many agree with you about it being the best sequel but I myself agree with you that it's an underrated movie and I like it.

T3 probably would be appreciated more if the humor had been toned down and a different actor for John or at least if he wasn't made so pu***fied
 
I mean, to beat a dead horse, this franchise is done. I fully expect the next step to just be a remake of The Terminator.

They've tried just about everything. Tried to make it about the future war, brought Arnold back, brought Linda Hamilton back.
People just don't care and with every film this series is driven further into the ground

Fans of the Terminator franchise cheering on a Terminator movie failing to make a more money. Something about that doesn't seem right. If you don't like the movie, that's fine. Gloating over this movie not pulling in big money though feels disrespectful to the franchise.
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This is a pretty silly point. And calling it "disrespectful to the franchise" seems dramatic

People don't want movies they think are bad to be rewarded. It's simple.

It’s a difficult question because I think that could be said for a number of franchises. The Halloween brand was dead a decade ago.

it’s what’s been said earlier, you can make people care but they have to miss it a bit. Had this been the first Terminator movie since 2003, things could’ve been different.
Halloween is a great example of reinvigorating a decades old franchise. ANd I think they simply did it by making a good movie. Didn't try and do a retread of the original, didn't have a bunch of obvious callbacks.

However Halloween does have the benefit of being cheap. Once your production budget is $10 mill, grossing $255.5 mill is outstanding

I actually agree on The Predator. That could still very much work. You just need to make it a down and dirty, R-rated survival film which is what the first one was at its essence. And you need colorful, charismatic characters that you root for.
I don't think Predator will work for the same reason that Terminator is suffering. It's a very finite series. How many times can you do the survival film thing once you've already done it 2-3 times before.

I would imagine this is officially the last terminator we’ll see for quite a while before the full blown remake10-15 years from now. Like the predator franchise last year its just time to put it to bed and move on as public interest just isn’t there.

Movies that try to capitalize on nostalgia all fall into the same trap of just retreading what the fanbase knows and expects or the basic checklist.

franchise’s in recent years that I can think of that have fallen victim to this:

terminator
Alien/ prometheus
Star Wars
Star Trek
Jurassic world
Predator
Robocop
All disney live action remakes

im sure Im forgetting others but its the same crap of retreading things we know instead of new creative ideas and new franchises. Marvel is the only studio the last ten years doing and trying new things.
I see your point, but some of those movies are still successful and audiences like them for the most part.

Christian Bale at the height of his popularity couldn’t open this franchise in 2009. It’s dead.
It came out during the backlash against Bale...but yeah if Bale post TDK couldn't save this I don't know what will.
 
Robocop vs Terminator really should have happened in 2003 instead of T3. I guess it can still happen but maybe Arnold have done it back then and the idea was still popular because of comics and video game
 
I know you guys will be like “HELL NAW!” to this but I’ve had this cool Predator/Rambo crossover in my mind for a while where Arnold returns as Dutch and teams with a Rambo to fight a swarm of Predators back in the Amazon jungle in a violent, R rated epic action flick. Something about those two old tough guys teaming up to fight these near invincible killing machines appeases me. But it’d probably tank at the BO too. Hehe.
 
I saw T3 again a couple of nights ago after YEARS and I thought "huh... so this wasn't so bad then!". I guess it gets retrospectively good because subsequent sequels weren't that great. But there's still a lot of aspects of T3 that are worthy.
 
I saw T3 again a couple of nights ago after YEARS and I thought "huh... so this wasn't so bad then!". I guess it gets retrospectively good because subsequent sequels weren't that great. But there's still a lot of aspects of T3 that are worthy.
I haven't seen it in years. I actually own the first 4 on Blu Ray.
But I remember it being not that good, but not terrible. Some elements I liked to it. I really liked the ending.
I remember it more as like Godfather III to Godfather and Godfather Part II
 
I mean, to beat a dead horse, this franchise is done. I fully expect the next step to just be a remake of The Terminator.

They've tried just about everything. Tried to make it about the future war, brought Arnold back, brought Linda Hamilton back.
People just don't care and with every film this series is driven further into the ground

As a big, action filled blockbuster, sure. But, I feel there is room for the franchise to exist in other forms.
 
Decades, or maybe even a century or two after humanity won the war against the machines, humanity has completely subjugated AI. So now you have these former Terminators and all of these machines serving as slaves while still developing their humanity. And they're growing this underground network due to this shared suffering. Meanwhile, on the human side, the now-deceased Connors have become these messianic figures who've been corrupted over time.



The only way to move Terminator forward in my mind is to literally move the story forward. Like way forward.

So

"Planet of the Terminators"?

Halloween is a great example of reinvigorating a decades old franchise. ANd I think they simply did it by making a good movie. Didn't try and do a retread of the original, didn't have a bunch of obvious callbacks.

Now that would be something. Jamie Lee Curtis VS Terminators
 
Decades, or maybe even a century or two after humanity won the war against the machines, humanity has completely subjugated AI. So now you have these former Terminators and all of these machines serving as slaves while still developing their humanity. And they're growing this underground network due to this shared suffering. Meanwhile, on the human side, the now-deceased Connors have become these messianic figures who've been corrupted over time.

The only way to move Terminator forward in my mind is to literally move the story forward. Like way forward.

That's a damn good idea for a future war movie while adding some other layers of dark, twisted oppression and other dynamics of human instinct, both noble and wicked.

I just don't know how I feel about being TOO sympathetic to Skynet and particularly the T-800s
 

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