The next Terminator movie needs to return to its horror roots - and It Follows could be the best template. The seed of the original Terminator was born from a horrible nightmare James Cameron had while running a fever in the early 1980s. He had just been fired from his directorial debut Piranha 2: The Spawning and dreamt of a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire, and dragging itself across a floor with a kitchen knife towards a female victim.
This vision was so vivid to Cameron that he fleshed it out into a treatment for what became The Terminator, and infused his action/horror hybrid with that same nightmarish feel. The movie was a surprise success and helped launch Arnold Schwarzenegger's movie star career. The duo would later return for 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which is still one of the most perfectly formed action blockbusters ever made. The latter film was an enormous hit that featured great performances, incredible action and groundbreaking CGI effects.
Sadly, the sequels since Terminator 2 have proved largely disappointing - both critically and financially. The franchise is too iconic to leave to wither and die, but if it's to be reborn, it must return to what made the concept so potent in the first place.
The Blockbuster Route Has Yielded Diminishing Returns
Every sequel since Terminator 2 has felt the need to emulate its blockbuster formula, offering viewers more and more outlandish action - but often at the cost of character and suspense. Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines has a couple of great setpieces and a shock ending, but it suffers badly from corny humor and a sanitized feel. Terminator: Salvation offered the series a soft reboot, landing a great cast - with Christian Bale as John Connor - and finally taking place in the future war.
Unfortunately, a messy production led to Salvation's script being constantly rewritten, leading to a muddled, unsatisfying blockbuster that was a financial disappointment. 2015's Terminator: Genisys may have sounded compelling on paper and saw Arnie return to the series after a long break, but from its performances to its convoluted plotting and action, the fifth entry is commonly considered the weakest.
Genisys still did respectable business and 2019's Terminator: Dark Fate was labeled as the "true" third movie. This was due to the return of creator James Cameron as producer and Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor. Once again, a bad script and overall sense of "being there, done that" saw it become the latest disappointing chapter, and the movie grossed a tepid $260 million worldwide, nixing sequel plans.
The Terminator Franchise Must Return To Its Horror Roots
There have been four sequels since Terminator 2, and none have even come close to the bar set by that 1991 entry. During a 2020 interview with THR, Hamilton revealed she'd be glad if she didn't have to return, but stated "I would really appreciate maybe a smaller version, where so many millions are not at stake," in response to the sequel having such a high budget.
Blockbusters have come a long way since Judgement Day, and while that movie's effects were truly revolutionary, today's audiences are now almost numb to impressive visual effects. The big budgets of later sequels often saw them downgraded from R ratings to PG-13, necessitating the removal of harsher violence or foul language. While Dark Fate eventually scored an R, it was shot both ways during production because producers were unsure of its financial prospects.
The consistently disappointing latter-day entries have shown that pursuing the blockbuster route is foolish. At its very core, The Terminator is a slasher movie, where a masked killer stalks a victim relentlessly and kills anybody who gets in its way. Cameron understood this implicitly, which is why both of his original films made such a lasting cultural impact. Remove the bigger setpieces or explosions from Terminator 2, the T-1000 would still function as a fantastic horror movie monster, which is how Cameron choose to frame him.
The Next Terminator Could Use It Follows As A Template
The Terminator series was quite literally born from a nightmare, and to recapture its mojo, it should return to that tone. It could even come back to Cameron's original idea of the Terminator being the ultimate infiltrator, and being able to blend into a crowd. The director originally had actor Lance Henriksen in mind for the part, but once he decided to cast Schwarzenegger, the concept of the machine being able to blend into a crowd went away.
Arnold has become so iconic in the role it's hard to picture the series without him - but it's also seen the series move further and further away from Cameron's original notion. The menace needs to be restored to the title villain, and a good template for this has already been seen with cult 2015 horror film It Follows. This chiller sees a teenager named Jay being relentlessly stalked by a supernatural being that can take the form of anyone, and is always walking slowly towards her, no matter where she is.
While far from an action movie, It Follows captures the elemental nightmarish feel Cameron imbued into the original Terminator. There was always a constant tension and anxiety about when the next attack would happen, with even the camera seemingly scanning the background of scenes for potential threats. A new Terminator could take some notes from It Follows if it wants to return to a horror template, and introduce a Terminator who can truly blend in with the crowd instead of a more recognizable figure like Arnold. The series has always chosen to give a definitive face to its villains, even though - especially in the case of the T-1000 - it would make more sense for the machines to constantly shapeshift to avoid detection or maintain the element of surprise.
The best path forward for The Terminator is to dial back on the wild action or tangled, time travel shenanigans and instead tell a lean, fast-paced horror/action hybrid like the original. The blockbuster template has only led to ever-decreasing quality, and viewers are ready to be scared by the central villain once again. The box-office tally of Dark Fate makes another reboot likely, and a revival that invests $20 million into a dark, R-rated chase movie than another $200 million into a tepid blockbuster, feels like the smarter bet for the franchise's potential future.