Terminator: Genisys helmer Alan Taylor has finally spoken out about his experience directing the much-maligned 2015 reboot and judging by his comments, the sequel was doomed before he even signed on. With three failed reboots under its belt, the Terminator franchise is quickly becoming one of Hollywood’s most troubled series. Beginning with James Cameron’s beloved one-two punch of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the series has failed to win back critical acclaim with its last four sequels, the latter three of which (Salvation, Genisys, and Dark Fate) serve as partial reboots.
While 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate introduced the Rev-9 and brought back the R-rating, Genisys was the first movie to reboot the timeline and introduce an alternative version of events. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines depicted the end of the world while Terminator Salvation was set long after the apocalypse, but Genisys instead opted to reintroduce a new Sarah Connor, now the adopted daughter of the T-800 who saved her as a child. The convoluted plot that followed was hard for casual viewers and even longtime fans to make sense of, and director Alan Taylor’s recent comments may shed light on why that is.
Back in the director’s chair for Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark, Taylor has finally addressed what went wrong with the reboot in a recent interview, and it is evident the project was doomed from its inception. Per Taylor, “All the voices in my head, and all the ones around me, were saying I should do it because who didn’t love the first two films? I thought we would go in and fix the script and everything could be great.” While Taylor’s nostalgia for the first two movies is shared by much of the fandom, the latter half of his comment is telling as it implies that Genisys’s script needed work before the filmmaker even took on the job.
This is likely the result of screenwriters Patrick Lussier and Laeta Kalogridis’ screenplay for Terminator: Genisys being a messy, timeline-hopping draft that only came into existence after the pair rejected the chance to script the sequel not once, but twice. The duo’s reticence around taking on the project resulted in a mess of knotted timelines that didn’t make sense before production even began. Thus, the sequel may have been doomed before Taylor signed on.
While some viewers took issue with Taylor’s direction, the television veteran was responsible for numerous acclaimed episodes of Game of Thrones as well as The Sopranos and had already proven he could make a star of Genisys heroine Emilia Clarke long before taking on the sci-fi sequel. Other factors such as Robert Patrick’s absence from Terminator: Genisys could have contributed to fan disinterest in the project, but given the shared pedigree of Taylor and Clarke, it is more likely that the flawed, unfocused screenplay was what really sank the reboot. Whether the franchise will ever win back audiences is unclear for now, but it is unlikely it will be with the help of anyone involved with Terminator: Genisys.