The Terminator franchise has been unable to win back audience interest for a while now, but returning to the original villain in Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 could do the trick. Released in 1984, The Terminator was a huge hit for helmer James Cameron. The terrifying sci-fi thriller was essentially a slasher movie with a futuristic twist, telling the tale of Sarah Connor, a human pursued by the titular android assassin to prevent her from giving birth to mankind’s future savior in a war against machines.
In the movie’s first sequel, Cameron flipped the script and reinvented the Terminator entirely. This time around, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s imposing robot was a protector of Sarah and her fated offspring John Connor, and the pair were pursued by a newer, even more lethal Terminator model. However, after switching the title character’s allegiances between the first and second movies, the Terminator franchise soon found there was nowhere else to go with Arnie’s droid.
Terminator 7 should reinvent its eponymous villain by bringing back his lethal old self.
The Terminator Was Originally A Cold-Blooded Killer
The first Terminator is a slasher at heart and Arnie’s villain is a nigh-unstoppable threat throughout, without any of the humor or levity of his later depictions. Bringing back that ferocity could revive the ailing series, which has struggled to keep audiences interested for years now. Although Terminator’s slasher roots could reignite interest by effectively reintroducing audiences to one of sci-fi cinema’s scariest antagonists.
Dark Fate Teased Arnie’s T-800 Return (& Let Viewers Down)
It is clear - judging by the most recent entries in the Terminator canon - that the series creators are aware the franchise is in a rut and needs to subvert expectations by shaking up the formula. Take, for example, Terminator: Genisys, which killed off John Connor and replaced him with a disguised Terminator - only to then spoil this twist in the trailers. However, this is not the worst case of the franchise almost nailing the sort of surprise viewers need to get invested in the series again. In the audacious Alien 3-style opening scene of Terminator: Dark Fate, young John Connor is killed outright by a pitiless T-800.
It’s a shocking scene and one a lot of viewers hated the moment it took place - seeing a defenseless kid gunned down was a brutal, unexpectedly dark opening to a blockbuster sequel. However, it was also a moment that called to mind the take-no-prisoners tone of the original 1984 movie and signaled this sequel would be an uncompromising, scary story, which was a promise the movie then reneged on throughout its runtime. Not only did Dark Fate not feature any scenes as shocking as its opening kill later in the story, viewers even later saw the same Terminator that killed John aging into retirement and becoming a suburban stepdad, one of the series’ most embarrassing missteps. Terminator: Dark Fate’s Carl, much like “Pops” of Genisys infamy, is proof the series refuses to make Arnie’s T-800 the cold-blooded killer he once was, despite this being the biggest step the movies could make toward winning back jaded Terminator audiences.
The T-800 Could Kill Off Sarah Connor
Harsh as it is to say, the Connor family have been dragging down the Terminator franchise throughout the last three (!) failed reboot attempts. Despite the duo of Sarah and John Connor providing the original narrative backbone, no amount of recasting/timeline-shifting can seem to make the characters work again. Dark Fate understood this enough to kill off John early, but bringing back the T-800 and having Arnie’s Terminator kill off Sarah Connor would reboot the series completely, force the creators to introduce new characters, and leave the world doomed to extinction-by-Skynet unless a whole new resistance was cooked up.
Currently, the movies can constantly introduce new characters and kill them off soon after (as epitomized by Terminator: Dark Fate’s doomed newcomer Grace) because it has the Connors to fall back on, with at least one of the family cropping up in every outing. John’s presence even managed to ruin Terminator Salvation, whose original, superior script barely featured the franchise hero before it was reworked into a more conventional sequel where he was placed front and center. The Terminator movies would be better without John Connor and his mother, and bringing back Arnie’s original T-800 to kill them off for good could re-establish some serious stakes in the action of the series. The Terminator has been a hero for long enough, and the once-ferocious killer is now overdue a reboot.
