• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Terminator Dark Fate bombs at the Box Office

CDiggity

Member
You know, maybe people are a little burnt out that this is the 4th attempt to make a sequel to T2. It doesn't help that in three of those attempts, they pretty much have the same plot beats as T2, which had a similar plot to the original Terminator.

So that is 5/6 movies with a plot of "Bad Future, Baddies send something back with goal of killing a target, Good Guys send something back to protect target"

For a shitty as Salvation was, they at least tried something different.
 
Last edited:
The studio is going to lose 100-million on the movie

It costs close to 200-million to make before marketing........ouch!!!

Were they really expecting the feminists to come by the bus-loads to watch it???!?!?
 

MisterHero

Super Member
Even if they didn't intend this at all, I feel the story is sort of a judgment of Edward Furlong's choices in the past couple decades. He didn't become a successful movie star, so the franchise can't use him anymore. I'm sure he's fine with that but it's not the same with just Sarah and a heroic T-800.

Bringing back Hamilton was a double-edged sword with Arnie obligingly appearing in worsening sequels.
 

Azurro

Banned
Well, it seems the woke marketing really hurt this movie. Apparently the actual movie is not THAT woke, but it still sucks to hear that
John Connor gets killed and replaced by a girl with the exact same role.
. Like, what's the point of doing that?

The woke interviews didn't help, but the trailers themselves just didn't do a good enough job of selling the movie. The enemy Terminator gets his ass kicked tons of times, so there's no feeling of this Terminator being relentless or powerful. Linda Hamilton really looks like she needs to watch the latest episode of Days of our Lives in her old people's home and the new friendly Terminator just doesn't stand out.

It's a shame, I've been waiting for a great Terminator sequel for basically all my adult life, and it seems I'll continue to wait...probably forever as this franchise is probably dead.
 

Cleared_Hot

Member
(spoilers territory ahead be awanred) I haven't see this but everything I read about it here and seen in trailers is awful. T2 ISNT GOING ANYWHERE folks. It's the sci to action thriller that all others are judged by. (no pun intended). It's a damn near flawless and beautiful filmed adrenaline shot. There was no chance this would be good as long as they kept forcing Arnold to be a part of it. This stupid old aged Terminator trying to be human is fucking retarded. You mean to tell me the super intelligent machines that invented time travel forgot to add follow-on missions to the terminators objectives?! Nah just murder John and then yay you're free like the genie!!! I'm sure the action is neat but they beat this dead horse and already sent it to the glue factory years ago. One and two were perfect and all that was ever necessary.
 
Last edited:

cryptoadam

Banned
It's a shame, I've been waiting for a great Terminator sequel for basically all my adult life, and it seems I'll continue to wait...probably forever as this franchise is probably dead.

Just stop waiting. T2 was the peak, it wrapped everything up perfectly. There is 0 reason to make more of them after T2. If you love Terminator watch T2 or T1 again, nothing will ever come close to it. Hollywood can't make moveis like that anymore and there is not another Arnold.

They will try again in a few years and you will be disapointed once again. That is the cycle of Terminator.
 

Cleared_Hot

Member
Also, it doesn't help that as tired as this plot device is, they even made a stupid movie on Netflix with the same fucking plot this year. (In the shadow of the moon). It's dead!!!


Furthermore, the last two movies produced by Cameron have been let downs despite him praising it... He is a force to be reckoned with as a director but damn if this doesn't make me worry about his avatar sequels more than I already have.
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
Should have given us the gritty Future War fans wanted since T2 came out 🤷🏻‍♂️
McG had the opportunity to do that in Salvation but he felt daytime scenes, non-laser weapons, and machines that made transformers noises were better.
I haven't seen Dark Fate yet but if they want to save the franchise they need to finally give us the future war (not the shit we saw in Salvation) and they need to embrace the horror element again.

A Terminator movie set in the early war with humans being hunted by the very first Terminator models would be cool. Otherwise the franchise feels stale.
Indeed.

They should have kept it simple. There was already a story to tell within the closed loop of the Terminator timeline as established by T1 and T2. Sculli used to post a good summary of it back in the day. A good future war movie would basically be the bottom right interim period and the bottom black text.


0nD6Q.png
 
If they want to reboot terminator they need to make a movie about a Terminator actually terminating something
the first movie was great as he had no training wheels and pretty much fucked shit up......t2 its safe to say if you were in the way of it you were dead

T3 had glimpses of this and the actor for the TX i dont think was that bad but by the time we rolled around to Genysis it was almost a comedy

Salvation i would put in its own bucket....Bale was probably the worst part of that movie as much as people like to shit on worthington the parts of that movie that sucked were actually all the scenes with Bale in it

The actor in Dark Fate for the rev9 was fantastic until he started to talk
 

Gargus

Banned
All I want is a proper release of terminator 1 and 2 on blu ray remastered from the negatives proper without fucking with the sound effects like they did with the first or DNR'ing the shit out of it like they did with 2.

That's all I want from terminator. No spin offs, no sequels, no nothing. Just 1 and 2 with a great blu ray release.
 

Azurro

Banned
Just stop waiting. T2 was the peak, it wrapped everything up perfectly. There is 0 reason to make more of them after T2. If you love Terminator watch T2 or T1 again, nothing will ever come close to it. Hollywood can't make moveis like that anymore and there is not another Arnold.

They will try again in a few years and you will be disapointed once again. That is the cycle of Terminator.

Well, saying I was waiting is a bit of hyperbole. It is more like "oh, there's a new Terminator coming out? Hope it's good", then seeing it's more of a shit train with every successive sequel, with less and less anticipation each time. At least Salvation was interesting with it taking place in the future war, even if it was a mess.
 

Doom85

Member
In the future depicted in the Terminator movies, where the social order has collapsed, the truth is that brute force would prevail again, as it has in the past in the real world, and as it does today in environments where might is king. In such a scenario, women would look to men for protection, as has always happened in the past. So Sarah Connor is correct in her expectation. But the woke screenwriters disagreed.

In a world where deadly robots and time travel exists, you won't suspend your disbelief on the bullshit you just spewed out? Pretty sure women can know how to use guns, knives, learn martial arts and self-defense, etc. I remember there was a movie in the 90's that showed that, it had some actress called Linda Hamilton in it, you gotta help me out here, what was it called?

Also, yeah, the past, because we all know the past wasn't mostly a consistent "only men are in the military" mindset. It's 2019, women being capable fighters is an accepted concept by anyone with at least half a working brain that a new social order wouldn't just de-evolve to discriminatory views because of flimsy "reasons".

Also, yeah, Terminators clearly go down in a fist fight. That's TOTALLY how that works. Gee, guys, this woman knows how to organize people, use weapons of all sorts, etc., but gee, this guy knows how to throw a punch harder. CLEARLY he is who we should follow, we all know "fists > bullets, grenades, tactical nukes, etc."

LOL, every sexist idiot who thinks "me have penis, me superior!" would likely walk right up to a T-800 and begin punching it to prove how "tough and manly" he is, then die a second later when the T-800 grabs his "manly skull" and proceeds to slam it against a wall repeatedly as the "manly corpse" then falls lifelessly to the ground.

Remember people, muscles are CLEARLY the key to winning against a Terminator. Also, women can never develop muscles enough to use weapons, you just hallucinated all those scenes in Terminator 2 where Linda Hamilton kicked ass and took names.

Leader of the Resistance, illegal immigrant from Mexico........riiiiiiight

Pretty sure after Legion nukes most of the world nobody gives a shit who's "legally" in a country anymore.
 

Romulus

Member
The whole series is an uphill climb for profitability. Most terminator fans are older now with kids or even grandkids. I would wager the majority of those people have been disappointed enough times to move on. I could see diehard fans giving it a shot after T3, or even the next failure, but come on. It's so fucking convoluted by this point we have to forget 3 films happened just for this to even work.

Die, please.
 
Last edited:

cryptoadam

Banned
Well, saying I was waiting is a bit of hyperbole. It is more like "oh, there's a new Terminator coming out? Hope it's good", then seeing it's more of a shit train with every successive sequel, with less and less anticipation each time. At least Salvation was interesting with it taking place in the future war, even if it was a mess.

Basically I came to the realization that they will never do Terminator justice again and Arnie is not the same as 80's/90's Arnie. A new Terminator will never be good because 1 and 2 were just so amazing that anything will always pale in comparison. And 1 and 2 told the story perfectly the only thing left is to retread the same story with new gimmicks.

Salvation was an intersting idea but they even screwed that one up somehow. The future war we all wanted to see and they managed to mess it up.

Terminator is better left in the past. Lets just enjoy the amazingness of the originals. They can't and don't make movies like that anymore.

And I bet you the next Terminator will be China focused because the studio is going to have to make money from somewhere, so we should expect T7: China Rising, with John Chen the leader of the resistance taking on the T-NBA, a Hong Kong nano bot liquid metal triple terminator.
 

cryptoadam

Banned
I guess this franchise won't be back.

It will. Cameron will get a dump truck of money to slap his name on it. I made another post but we all know where its going.

Sarah Chen and John Chen need to be protected from the T-NBA. The movie will take place in China and the great Firewall will protect China from USANet, the evil American AI created by Donald Trump that nuked the world. USANet sends back the T-1Billion to kill the Chen's, but a protector robot is created by Huwai and Xiaomi called the Xi-800.

The end the Xi-800 destroyes the T-NBA and shoves Winni the Poo into a molten lava pit and the world celebrates the great Xi and China's great firewall.

Watch the Yuen roll in baby.
 

Sub_Level

wants to fuck an Asian grill.
If they want to reboot terminator they need to make a movie about a Terminator actually terminating something
the first movie was great as he had no training wheels and pretty much fucked shit up......t2 its safe to say if you were in the way of it you were dead

T3 had glimpses of this and the actor for the TX i dont think was that bad but by the time we rolled around to Genysis it was almost a comedy

Salvation i would put in its own bucket....Bale was probably the worst part of that movie as much as people like to shit on worthington the parts of that movie that sucked were actually all the scenes with Bale in it

The actor in Dark Fate for the rev9 was fantastic until he started to talk

The T3000 is the worst since its basically a demi-god. Could probably murder an entire city on its own. And it somehow it was the least threatening bad guy in the entire series. Zero tension.

And thank you for pointing out that John Connor sucked in Salvation. He was a call of duty dudebro. Should've kept the focus on Marcus and Reese.
 
It will. Cameron will get a dump truck of money to slap his name on it. I made another post but we all know where its going.

Sarah Chen and John Chen need to be protected from the T-NBA. The movie will take place in China and the great Firewall will protect China from USANet, the evil American AI created by Donald Trump that nuked the world. USANet sends back the T-1Billion to kill the Chen's, but a protector robot is created by Huwai and Xiaomi called the Xi-800.

The end the Xi-800 destroyes the T-NBA and shoves Winni the Poo into a molten lava pit and the world celebrates the great Xi and China's great firewall.

Watch the Yuen roll in baby.

You forgot the most important part - USA Net is a gestalt intelligence distributed in millions of robotic sparrows armed with razor-sharp talons and machine guns in their mouths. Only the Chinese can murder all the evil robobirds.
 
Last edited:

Hissing Sid

Member
Christ what a wanker. Where the fuck do they dig these idiots up?

Edit.

Seriously where do people like this get off treating their potential customers like shit? Wtf was this Prat thinking?

I mean, it's not HIS money he's fucking around with here is it? No it's the studios money. It's investors money. The studio hired this cupcake to direct a film, not spend his time on their dime shit talking on social media, picking fights with potential customers and virtue signalling from the back of his trusty white steed on the fucking internet with his political banners waving in the breeze.

Who the fuck does this in their job? It's honestly insane!

*Dring Dring*

'Hey Mr Sid? Boeing is on the line enquiring about our new line of carbon fibre precursor, sounds like they're interested in a substantial order. Would you like to take the call?'

'Thanks Sally I'll take it from here..... Hello? You want to buy some of our precursor? That's fine but before you give me money I just need to know......

.......Are you scared of powerful women you probable sexist trolls? Do strong women scare you you misogynist cunts? What's that? I can no longer count on your business? Yeah well, I don't give a fuck!'

*Receiver slams down*

Yeah, no.

Like I said, what a wanker. Can't the studios gag arseholes like this?
 
Last edited:

-Arcadia-

Banned
It’s probably not exclusively the fault of wokeness, but when you’re trying to reboot and recover a beloved but troubled franchise, it likely did not help at all.

Any bit of grace fans might have had for the concept, was pretty immediately nuked by that, in my observations.
 

gatti-man

Member
In the future depicted in the Terminator movies, where the social order has collapsed, the truth is that brute force would prevail again, as it has in the past in the real world, and as it does today in environments where might is king. In such a scenario, women would look to men for protection, as has always happened in the past. So Sarah Connor is correct in her expectation. But the woke screenwriters disagreed.
if you watch the movie in the future most of the fighters are men and the woman they send back is a towering strong woman who is augmented after getting wrecked by a terminator so yeah it’s realistic in that man are still strong. The woman is important because she’s an inspirational leader not some physical butch destroyer.
Well, it seems the woke marketing really hurt this movie. Apparently the actual movie is not THAT woke, but it still sucks to hear that
John Connor gets killed and replaced by a girl with the exact same role.
. Like, what's the point of doing that?

The woke interviews didn't help, but the trailers themselves just didn't do a good enough job of selling the movie. The enemy Terminator gets his ass kicked tons of times, so there's no feeling of this Terminator being relentless or powerful. Linda Hamilton really looks like she needs to watch the latest episode of Days of our Lives in her old people's home and the new friendly Terminator just doesn't stand out.

It's a shame, I've been waiting for a great Terminator sequel for basically all my adult life, and it seems I'll continue to wait...probably forever as this franchise is probably dead.
Literally all your complaints aren’t valid if you watch the movie. The trailers are criminally bad and there is so many great moments in the film idk how they thought the trailers they made were a good idea. Johns death is thoroughly explained and somewhat plot important.
 
Last edited:

tkscz

Member
Why do studios think that putting James Cameron's name near Terminator these days means it will do well? Unless "Directed by" and/or "Written by" is with his name, I know the movie will be shit, and guess what? This movie was shit. Like the fuck is up with The Legion and a T-800 showing up every two years? Was that shit in Genesys? I didn't see that movie. It has it's wokeness in there, every male character gets killed off and the only male character who doesn't is barely in the moved. The main character is an illegal immigrate which adds little to the plot. Other than that it's story is everywhere and it's just a cluster fuck of a movie.
 

winisus

Neo Member
1. T2
2. T1
3. T3
The rest are just garbage.

dumb thing what they did to john in the beginning.
old t-800, married, family man is just plain dumb.
dani is a forgettable character
sarah looks tired
grace reminds me of this guy

ZswMQi4P-hDD7H9Q6L2FwAGHn-EnS6mS1dtBI_jW3Vw.jpg
 
1. T2
2. T1
3. T3
The rest are just garbage.

dumb thing what they did to john in the beginning.
old t-800, married, family man is just plain dumb.
dani is a forgettable character
sarah looks tired
grace reminds me of this guy

ZswMQi4P-hDD7H9Q6L2FwAGHn-EnS6mS1dtBI_jW3Vw.jpg

hard for me to entertain the notion that T3 wasn’t clown shoes ridiculous. Sure, the Termanatrix was hot as hell but thats it
 

kunonabi

Member
hard for me to entertain the notion that T3 wasn’t clown shoes ridiculous. Sure, the Termanatrix was hot as hell but thats it

Good performances from Claire Danes and Stahl, some good action sequences, and a fantastic ending helped it. It's a little too comedic and suffers from being T2 again with a worse villain and dodgier effects but that still puts it way ahead of all the other sequels.
 

Bkdk

Member
Might still break even in the end with foreign box office but this series is dead, woke agenda certainly doesn’t help but not the main reason it fail.
 

Grinchy

Banned
Random question:

is that really Mackenzie Davis’ butt we see or was it a body double?
Was her face and her ass on screen at the same time? That's usually how you can tell. You never get any mid to high tier actress to show her naked ass on screen without making sure the audience knows it's really Jessica Biel standing there in her panties making me want to shove my face inside and live there.
 

Weiji

Banned
You guys are delusional if you think the woke nonsense had nothing to do with it failing. Being woke was a vital part of its marketing with the director himself ridiculing the "toxic male" fanbase. It doesn't matter if it didn't actually feature any wokeness since it's what they wanted people to believe.

Old, dead in the water franchises have been successfully resurrected, such as Jurassic Park. What people truly didn't care about was Linda Hamilton and radical feminism being shoved down their throat.

I’ve actually been theorizing for a while that shoehorning “wokeness” into the marketing is a desperation ploy.

It deflects the crappyness of the movie being the cause of its failure and acts as a sort of Hail Mary towards coastal idiots that might go see it to get one over on the alt right Nazis that want to see the movie flop.

Kinda worked with ghostbusters, definitely didn’t here.
 
T2 was already almost a perfect movie at every level.

Trying to make T3 over and over again has never made sense. You know The Godfather, Part II? Francis Ford Coppola tried to make The Godfather, Part III once and audiences didn't like it so he STOPPED. He didn't keep trying to make The Godfather, Part III over and over again until audiences decided they would like it.

Leave Terminator be. The original film and the first (and only) sequel are both amazing films and remembered decades later as masterpieces of their craft. Stop trying to extend the "franchise" because there isn't one. The "franchise" ended after Judgment Day back in 1991.
 

ruvikx

Banned
Imagine if Wonder Woman was killed in the first 5 minutes of her sequel & replaced with Wonder Man? Imagine how that would sit with critics, politicians & the social political environment today?

John Connor was the leader of the resistance & the central character of the entire Terminator story. End of. Replacing him with a midget Mexican girl just because "women rule in our future!" was a deliberate choice meant to provoke (certainly considering the ham-fisted scene where Sarah makes a "sexist" assumption that her unborn son is the target before the "mega reveal" which shows it's actually the girl who's the "badass savior of humans"). I'm happy to see it backfired & it's also easy to undo, i.e. the next Terminator movie (if that ever happens) can simply use the magic plot device aka time travel to eliminate everything that occurs in this timeline.
 

Azurro

Banned
Literally all your complaints aren’t valid if you watch the movie. The trailers are criminally bad and there is so many great moments in the film idk how they thought the trailers they made were a good idea. Johns death is thoroughly explained and somewhat plot important.

I've spoiled the shit out of the movie for me, and no, I feel my complaints are still valid. They killed John fucking Connor in the first 5 minutes, and the only reason to do that is to literally replace him with a character with the exact same role, except that it's a minority woman. That and family man Terminator that doesn't have sex is fucking stupid.

I'm not going to give money to that shit.
 
Last edited:

ruvikx

Banned
What’s woke about the film?

I dont think this has much to do with "go woke" shit.

It didn't fail because it was "woke".

This has become the new defense force for #teamwokeness, i.e. a dishonest denial of evident far left agenda when it's shoved in our face like an unwanted dick in the eye. The movie shames Sarah Connor because she makes a "sexist" assumption & chooses to remake the exact same plot as T1 & T2 with a midget Mexican girl as the savior + an androgynous female Kyle Reese as her protector. It also turns the T-800 into some sort of low testosterone beta male with guilt.

Maybe some people have been in the boiling pot of Hollywood social engineering for too long & don't notice this shit, but to a vast number of people (including people aka men who'd normally go watch a Terminator movie), it's freaking evident.
 

Yoda

Member
TBH, even the original Terminator wasn't meant for a sequel. From my point of view, even Terminator 2 was just a "here's what we could've done with a proper production cycle". Terminator 2 was a fantastic movie, but from a franchise PoV it literally didn't move the needle at all.

I'll always agree that shoehorning a political agenda into the movie when it doesn't fit (it didn't fit here) is toxic and annoying, but I don't think that's why it failed. There hasn't been a good Terminator movie in nearly 20 years, this is Hollywood (lazily) trying to cash in on a brand and audiences have wise-ed up to the tactic for this particular franchise.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom