While Terminator: Dark Fate director Tim Miller may not have any plans to return to the Terminator franchise any time soon, his advice on how to make a prospective Terminator 7 work is still a solid plan for the series. No one seems to know how to make the Terminator franchise work. Even original Terminator creator James Cameron’s plans for the franchise could have ruined the series before it even began if budgetary concerns hadn’t scuppered his flawed first draft.
As such, Terminator: Dark Fate director Tim Miller’s reticence around discussing his ideas for the franchise is understandable. Miller’s 2019 sequel was the fifth Terminator project (out of seven movies) that underperformed with critics, joining Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator: Salvation, and Terminator: Genisys in the ever-growing pile of interesting, but expensive and flawed Terminator followups. This fate makes Miller’s uncertainty around the Terminator franchise, and his simple prescription for its potential future, all the more reasonable.
Much like Terminator series star Linda Hamilton, Miller isn’t excited or enthusiastic about the franchise’s future but does think that a low-budget, less highly-hyped reboot could revitalize interest in the property. The Terminator: Dark Fate director admitted during a San Diego Comic Con 2022 panel that Terminator: Dark Fate failed to connect with audiences, but insisted that the Terminator franchise still had potential. Specifically, he said a cheaper, stripped-down take on the material could succeed, and he’s not wrong. The question, then, is whether or not the infamously expensive Terminator series can take the advice of Miller and Hamilton on board in the future.
Tim Miller’s Terminator 7 Pitch Explained
Per Miller’s own words, “I think if you make a lower cost Terminator movie, a good director and movie star could make it great. It could be made with sock puppets and it could be awesome.” A return to the Terminator franchise’s slasher roots would be almost impossible to pull off since series star Arnold Schwarzenegger’s heroic take on the T-800 is now as iconic as his original android villain. However, this doesn’t change the fact that the simple concept of an unstoppable inhuman assassin chasing human targets is an undeniably effective idea that the series hasn’t revisited in decades and one that could breathe new life in the often over-complicated Terminator formula.
The two most recent Terminator movies spent $185 million and $155 million respectively on rebooting the already-complex timeline of the series, reintroducing new versions of existing franchise characters as well as adding new characters to the mix. It is no wonder that Rick and Morty broke its own time travel rule to mock the Terminator franchise’s incomprehensible timelines in one episode’s parody of the series. The Terminator movies have lost touch with the basic premise that made the original outing such a success, which is why Terminator: Dark Fate helmer Tim Miller is correct to say that a potential Terminator 7 could benefit from a return to this simpler, stripped-down storytelling approach.