Terminator Director Slams His Own Movie As Wrong

Terminator has been a long and storied franchise, but the director of the worst film in the franchise has admitted that making the film was wrong.

By James Brizuela | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

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Often when filmmakers go for the “cash grab” option of a franchise, they never apologize for those actions. People are often quick to point out when a franchise has overstayed its welcome, and when it should not have been revived at all. That was certainly the case for the newest Terminator: Dark Fate film. The Terminator franchise should have ended a long time ago, but another film was sadly made which reunited Arnold Schwarzenegger with Linda Hamilton. The film was not great, and now director Tim Miller has reiterated that point. According to Miller, “Terminator’s an interesting movie to explore, but maybe we’ve explored it enough. I went in with the rock hard nerd belief that if I made a good movie that I wanted to see, it would do well. And I was wrong. It was one of those f****** Eureka moments in a bad way because the movie tanked.”

Quite honestly, Terminator was once a great franchise, but that greatness should have stopped with the third film. Even though the fourth film did bring in Christian Bale, who was fantastic in it, the franchise should have not gone past that point. Terminator: Dark Fate was just the studio and apparently Tim Miller wants to see the legacy characters of the franchise reunite one final time. It was completely unnecessary, and it is kind of surreal that Miller was willing to admit that he was wrong in wanting to make another film. Terminator: Dark Fate made $261 million in worldwide box office numbers, but with such a high budget, the film ended up losing around $122 million. This makes the film one of the biggest flops in cinema history.

There had apparently been plans to reboot or continue the Terminator franchise further, but since it underperformed greatly at the box office, most of those plans were immediately scrapped. However, an untitled survival video game is currently being worked on, but that might just focus on the greatness that Terminator and T2: Judgement Day held. We are not saying the franchise couldn’t be rebooted in the future, but let’s just move past the storyline that involves John Connor, Sarah Connor, and Arnold’s character. Artificial Intelligence and self-aware robots that want to murder mankind will always work in storyline form.

Tim Miller may have missed the mark with Terminator: Dark Fate, but the man still has a ton of great material on his resume. He famously directed the first Deadpool film, and he has produced and directed several episodes of the hit Netflix series, Love, Death & Robots. We can see a theme emerging with the man’s love for technology and robots. Hopefully, he will be asked to helm a further entry in the Terminator franchise, just not one that has anything to do with the past characters. A new and fresh take on the franchise might be something to look forward to in the future.

The first two films in the Terminator franchise will go down as some of the best movies ever made, especially T2. However, the story of the Connor family needs to be forgotten if the franchise is going to rebound at some point. Skynet can still be one of the main focuses of the new proposed franchise, but maybe they could be more aware of what they are doing. Skynet could mistakenly think they can create self-aware robots, only to still be murdered by the robots. We just wrote a million-dollar idea right there. We appreciate what Tim Miller was trying to do, it was just not executed that well.