Originally intended to be the second in a planned trilogy, McG’s Terminator: Salvation 2 would have depicted the invasion of London by Skynet. Beginning with James Cameron’s tense, terrifying sci-fi slasher The Terminator in 1984, the Terminator series started life as a brutal slice of tense action-horror before moving into a more action-oriented direction with its sequels. Eventually, The Babysitter director McG took over the directorial reins of the franchise leading to 2009 sequel Terminator: Salvation.
Heavily recut and rewritten both due to studio notes and the need to secure a more PG-13 rating, the originally promising Terminator: Salvation lost its killer twist ending and a lot of effective action during revisions. However, the movie’s tortured production process didn’t stop McG from planning sequels before it was released, and the follow-up to Terminator: Salvation would have seen the series head to an entirely new location to depict the end of the world. Terminator: Salvation was originally intended to be the starting point for a new trilogy, but a mixture of legal issues and the fourth outings lukewarm reception saw those plans come to nothing.
McG’s Terminator: Salvation 2 would have taken place in present-day London as Skynet, the A.I. that provides the franchise with its titular cyborg foes, descended on the city and wreaked havoc. McG had ambitious plans for the trilogy’s content, and in addition to a technological assault on England’s capital city, other drafts of his proposed follow-up included ideas like the return of series icons Robert Patrick and Linda Hamilton. Few of these ideas were revisited in later installments Terminator: Genisys and Terminator: Dark Fate but perhaps they should have been, given how promising the trilogy sounds on paper and how underwhelming those later installments proved to be.
Terminator: Salvation 2’s London Attack
McG had plenty of ideas for where to take the franchise next, which included Bale's John Connor traveling back in time to London circa 2011 to warn the world of the impending machine invasion, with Skynet having figured out a way to send non-Infiltrators units through time. According to an interview the director gave to Screen Rant back in 2009, John’s task would be bringing together the world’s militaries en masse so that humanity might stand a chance against Skynet's onslaught. Skynet - being no slouches when it comes to sci-fi villainy - would have by this point worked out how to bring, as McG put it, “more than one naked entity” into the past to thwart Connor. As a result, Bale’s hero would likely have faced down numerous different Terminator models in the urban setting.
McG wanted the Terminator: Salvation sequel, like his first film, to focus on large-scale action sequences more than the chase-based narrative of the first two movies. Eschewing the approach taken by James Cameron of limiting the cast and simplifying the story, McG instead wanted “hunter killers and transports and harvesters” all arriving via time travel into the modern-day world and John Connor being forced to take them down with the military hardware on his side. More of a war movie between Terminators and humans than a chase film, the proposed Terminator: Salvation sequel sounds like nothing the franchise has offered before or since.
Robert Patrick’s Terminator Return
Switching up the setting and tone for Terminator: Salvation 2 wasn’t the only new concept McG had for his second installment. Where the first Terminator: Salvation didn’t include an appearance from original Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger - aside from a CGI double featuring his likeness - the sequel would have seen his old arch-nemesis crop up again, but not the way viewers may have expected. Robert Patrick, who played the ice-cold assassin the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, would have returned to play a human scientist studying cell replication. This may initially sound underwhelming to those who wanted Patrick back in his most beloved role, but further inspection of the sequel’s plans implies a villainous part may have been on the horizon for Patrick’s character.
Much like Helena Bonham Carter’s largely excised Terminator: Salvation character Selena, as a scientist working close to Skynet’s experimental T-1000, odds are Patrick’s character could have ended up being the human-Terminator hybrid who formed the basis of the first T-1000 model. It’s a fascinating idea that would have allowed the talented thespian to bring a human side to the famously unflappable villain, something that would have made his eventual transformation into the steely-eyed, inhuman T-1000 all the more terrifying. The Alien franchise would go on to explore similar themes with Michael Fassbender’s android David in the Prometheus duology, but those sci-fi sequels weren’t quite daring enough to contrast the robotic villain with his original human model. That's exactly what the sequel's screenwriter wanted, with him describing the dramatic potential of a now-aging Patrick devoting his life to preserving youth and vitality only to then be faced with the sight of his lean, mean younger self - albeit now in killer robot form.
Linda Hamilton’s (Original) Return to Terminator
Okay, so original Terminator series star Linda Hamilton was eventually brought back to her iconic role as Sarah Connor later in the franchise, as was the title character, Arnold Schwarzenegger. But with both returns so long delayed, audiences felt understandably short-changed by their eventual reappearances, with some critics accusing the series of nostalgia-baiting to maintain relevance. However, McG’s planned Terminator: Salvation sequels would have brought back both Hamilton and Schwarzenegger in major roles far earlier. Not a lot is known about these proposed plans, as William Wisher - the screenwriter who mentioned them in an interview - was not involved with McG’s draft that featured a London attack, so although he worked on the proposed trilogy, there were clear differences about how the series would have pulled off these ambitious returns. Seeing Hamilton's Sarah sharing the screen with Bale's John also sounds like a concept with juicy dramatic potential. McG's first outing in the franchise was an underrated slice of sci-fi action marred by missing its unforgiving original ending, so it’s a shame the Terminator: Salvation sequels never saw the light of day.