The Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Due to the wild success of the first and second Terminator movies, it does make sense that filmmakers wanted to further capitalize on the story's popularity and thus added more films to the line-up. However, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and it is because of this that the series as a whole is now stagnant.
There is absolutely no doubt that Arnold Shwarzenegger's T-800 and the Connor family are iconic and are renowned globally for their gripping suspense and their intense action. The story itself, while indeed interesting, has since taken a turn for the worse, as more and more confusing situations and lore have been added to the once-compelling idea that was the original concept. Despite the brand and iconography being as lucrative as they are, the cornerstone films of the franchise are Terminators 1 and 2, and it would have been much better if series simply stopped with them instead of branching off into further installments.
Terminator Was Never Designed As A Franchise
The initial story of Terminator was created by award-winning director James Cameron, who, along with writer William Wisher, was the driving force of the first two films. Cameron is notorious for his endless supply of creativity when it comes to the films that he makes, and Terminators 1 and 2 are just a couple of examples of his artistic prowess. While there was much excitement for a third installment in the franchise are T2's release, Cameron himself was unfortunately not at the helm for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Likewise, William Wisher was not listed as a writer on the project. In fact, Cameron actually went on the record after T3's debut that "never planned on doing a third film, because the story was finished with T2." With a quote like that straight from the source, it is no wonder why the franchise began to regress from then on.
Terminator Had Two Good Stories - And Told Them
When looked at objectively, Terminator is rather simple. The extremely unlucky the awesomely terrifying T-1000, a more advanced, deadlier, and potentially even more intimidating killer robot.
Essentially, despite the complexity of the universe's lore, Terminators 1 and 2 succeeded because of their simplicity. It is because of this simplicity that, by the end of the second film, everything gets wrapped up in a nice little bow. The T-1000 is destroyed, the inception of the evil artificial intelligence unit known as Skynet (the leader of the future machine rebellion) is prevented, and Sarah and John are definitively safe from Terminators once and for all. Not only this, but the DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film even went so far as to include an alternate ending that depicts Sarah as an elderly woman and loving grandmother and John as a highly-respected United States senator. This perfect ending is unfortunately dashed by the release of the Rise of the Machines movie, as it showed that everything that was done in the previous film to prevent Judgment Day was for naught in that it wasn't averted, but rather postponed - not to mention the fact that they killed Sarah Connor off-screen.
This and all other films following completely compromises the initial simplicity of the Terminator franchise, sabotaging a core tenet of what made the series work so well. It's undeniably irable that other directors and writers tried their best to add new, surprising elements to the film and its universe - and some of those elements were surely interesting in their own right, like Terminator: Genisys. However, the fact of the matter is that the more films and mileage that are tacked onto the original, cohesive ideas that were Terminator and Terminator 2, the more it seems like the franchise is trying too hard, which as a result has led to its downfall.
Terminator's Recent History Proves The Franchise Is Dead
It is safe to say that the Terminator franchise has since been struggling. Every single film following Judgment Day has done its utter best to live up to its predecessors, but ultimately come up short due. This is obviously not for a lack of trying. On more than one occasion, James Cameron himself attempted to save his beloved franchise. In one instance, he openly endorsed Genisys, making the claim that audiences would love the film, which unfortunately backfired and made the film's poor reception even worse. Additionally, Cameron came back to co-write Terminator: Dark Fate's story, which takes place in an alternate timeline that deliberately disregards all four of the other movies after T2. The film even went so far as to bring Linda Hamilton back to reprise her role as Sarah Conner - but, sadly, it still was not enough to keep the brand alive.
It has become rather clear that no matter how many newer, fancier Terminator models are introduced to the lore, or how many confusingly-complex time travel shenanigans are employed to the plot, the franchise wasn't constructed to work after Terminator: Judgment Day. While further installments in the saga are possible if not likely, it stands to reason they will unfortunately only continue to prove where the natural end point of the franchise ultimately was.
