Terminator 2: Judgment Day Ruined The Franchise

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of the greatest action movies ever made, but it totally ruined Terminator as a film franchise. Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of the greatest action movies ever made, but it also ruined the very franchise it helped create. Released in 1991, T2: Judgment Day was James Cameron’s somewhat belated follow-up to his low-budget hit from 1984, The Terminator, once again starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton. For his sequel, Cameron flipped the script: Hamilton’s Sarah Connor was no longer the woman in need of rescuing, but a true action heroine. Schwarzenegger’s T-800 underwent a similarly seismic shift,

moving from the villain of the first movie to the hero of the second. With a bigger budget, advanced technology, and higher stakes, Terminator 2: Judgement Day was and still is a high-point of action cinema. However, the film has spawned a series of movies that are, being generous, underwhelming at best, from 2003’s Terminator 3 to 2015’s misfire Terminator Genisys, with Dark Fate that latest to try and turn the franchise back around. But for all the mistakes and missteps, and for all Terminator 2’s quality, some of the core problems lie in what Judgment Day did.

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Judgment Day Breaks Terminator’s Sad Ending

The ending of the original Terminator movie doesn’t, on the face of it, leave a huge amount of room for a follow-up. Its take on time travel largely exists within a predestination paradox, or a closed time loop. Kyle Reese travels back from the future, in which he fights for the resistance under his son, John Connor, in an effort to make sure his son is conceived and eventually born There’s a sad sense of inevitability in the ending, as it’s confirmed that Reese isn’t there to change things, but simply ensure they happen. He sacrifices himself for the future, and the loop remains in tact. That’s all undone by Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Instead of the previous efforts, which were to ensure things went as normal so that John Connor could lead the resistance in Judgment Day, this becomes more directly about preventing or changing it, and the future becomes something malleable.

nstead of the power of fate, as seen in The Terminator, this instead becomes a matter of choice. That’s not inherently a bad thing in and of itself, and it certainly works wonders for conjuring up a thrilling story in Terminator 2. But it’s in opening the timeline up and suggesting that it can be changed that has had such a dire result on the rest of the franchise. The Terminator timeline in the movies since has been retconned, reset, reversed, and gone through just about every other imaginable revision. Judgment Day itself has undergone a variety of alterations and differing dates, and none of it has ever really felt cohesive, which is partly why Terminator: Dark Fate is ignoring the previous three movies. The timeline is a mess, but that started with Terminator 2.

Judgment Day Makes Terminators Footsoldiers

What’s interesting about The Terminator, when contrasted to the rest of the franchise, is that the Terminators themselves are just one part of the bigger Skynet puzzle. It makes it clear that the T-800 is simply the latest robot, and the first capable of convincingly passing off as a human, which is why it’s sent back in time. The Terminator here is used for infiltration purposes. When we see glimpses of the future war, it’s clear that Skynet has an array of bigger, better machinery and weaponry. Judgment Day changes this. While the Terminator is still used for infiltration because of their ability to pass as human – now upgraded to the T-1000 – it’s also in Terminator 2 that we see Skynet

are predominantly using the Terminator machines as their footsoldiers in the future war. In a way, this makes sense: certainly from a marketing perspective, it delivers a very clear and distinct iconography. That’s something all subsequent movies have continued to develop, introducing a number of different kinds of Terminators over the years with a variety of skill-sets and uses. Each has moved further away from the core idea of what the Terminator was, and not for the better because it simply done as they’re recognisable, which again finds its genesis in Terminator 2.

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Judgment Day Was A Huge Box-Office Success (& Turned Terminator Into A True Franchise)

Upon release in 1984, The Terminator was a pretty solid hit from then-fledgling filmmaker James Cameron. Made on a budget of just $6.4 million, the film grossed $78.3 million at the worldwide box-office, which was impressive, although not quite enough to put the sequel into motion immediately (with sticking points around the rights and tech). At that point, while it’d performed well, it wasn’t clear that Terminator would spawn another movie, let alone another five. When Terminator 2: Judgment Day did arrive in 1991, once Cameron had proved the technology could work and the rights issues had been somewhat cleared up, that changed things.

This was a much bigger affair all-round, with Cameron, off the back of more successes such as Aliens, working on a budget of around $100 million. That paid-off though, with Terminator 2: Judgment Day grossing $520.8 million worldwide, enough to make it the highest grossing movie of the year. It still didn’t lead to a rush on sequels (though if the relative success happened in today’s Hollywood, it absolutely would do), but it certainly laid the groundwork. The future was made open and flexible by Judgment Day, and now it had the box-office bonafides to go with that potential. That led to Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation,

Terminator now, Terminator: Dark Fate. Four movies in 16 years isn’t rapid by today’s standards, but in each one the thinking can be traced back to Judgment Day’s success, and the idea it created that Terminator is a viable movie franchise to keep hammering away at. Budgets got bigger, box-office returns got smaller, but there has always been the lingering specter of Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s success, and the hope those glory days will be back. They never have been, because Terminator was never that valuable as a brand, it just so happened there was one truly incredible action movie within it, but unfortunately it became a victim of its own success.