James Cameron Knows Exactly What Went Wrong With Terminator: Dark Fate

"Terminator" fans are eating well in 2024, thanks to "Terminator Zero." Mattson Tomlin's anime series is not only one of the best sci-fi shows of the year, but it also takes the "Terminator" franchise back to its cyber-horror roots while at the same time actually enriching its themes about fate and why humanity even deserves not to be wiped out by the machines in the first place. That's a welcome reprieve for a sci-fi property whose central storyline has been "eating its own tail for a very long time ('Terminator: Dark Fate' innocent)," to quote BJ Colangelo in her "Zero" review for /Film.

Like BJ, though, I'm also a "Dark Fate" apologist. The 2019 movie saw James Cameron working on the "Terminator" franchise for the first time since "Terminator 2," and it showed. While "Dark Fate" doesn't reach the same (admittedly, rather high) bar as Cameron's 1984 "The Terminator" and "Terminator 2: Judgement Day," it nevertheless makes a valiant attempt to move the story forward while simultaneously updating the property's Cold War-born politics for an era where drone surveillance and anti-immigrant sentiment run rampant. That and its villain, essentially a T-800/T-1000 hybrid known as the Rev-9 (Gabriel Luna, who's chillingly uncanny as a killer robot pretending to be human), is the closest a live-action "Terminator" villain has come to being legit scary since Robert Patrick's iconic T-1000 in "T2."

Cameron, who co-wrote and produced "Dark Fate" with Tim Miller directing, agrees. "I think the Rev-9 was cool as s**t," he told Empire. "Personally, I think that's as good as anything that we did back then." Unfortunately, despite earning respectable reviews from critics, the film was a flop, making just a little over $250 million at the box office against a $185 million budget (the lowest gross for a "Terminator" film since the way-lower-budgeted original). For that, Cameron blames himself.

No one would ever accuse James Cameron of being humble (and he's earned the right not to be), so it's a testament to the "Titanic" and "Avatar" director that he held his own feet to the fire while discussing what went wrong with "Dark Fate." As Cameron sees it, "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.'"

For context: "Dark Fate" saw "The Terminator" and "T2" star Linda Hamilton return as Sarah Connor for the first time in almost 30 years, with Arnold Schwarzenegger popping up yet again as an aged T-800. Cameron, however, told Empire he was guilty of "getting high on my own supply" about the idea of making a movie that would function as a direct follow up to "T2" and basically ignore the three sequels before it. The problem, he admitted, was that he didn't really think about just how much the filmgoing landscape and, more to the point, general audiences had changed since the early 1990s:

"We achieved our goal. We made a legit sequel to a movie where the people that were actually going to theaters 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."

There's some truth to what Cameron is getting at here, at least in terms of how the film was sold. Where the marketing for a successful legacy sequel like "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" focused as much on its young lead as the returning cast, the "Dark Fate" trailers were too concerned with the film's legacy elements. Combined with the general sense that the "Terminator" franchise had been running on fumes for years by then, it's little wonder audiences stayed away, even if "Dark Fate" itself is much more interested in speaking to present-day concerns and not merely playing the property's greatest hits than its advertising seemed to indicate.

Still, Cameron feels good about the movie. "I think the film's cracking. I still think mine are the best, but I put it in solid third," he added. Again, nobody would accuse Cameron of being humble, but it's hard to dispute him on that one.