The director of 2009’s Terminator Salvation, McG, recently opened up about how Warner Bros. changed the film’s ending, which was apparently filmed as a much darker conclusion.
Speaking to ComicBook, McG — real name Joseph McGinty Nichol — said that he wasn’t happy that Salvation underwent so many changes behind the scenes. Namely, he revealed that there is a cut of the film that includes an ending that McG calls “beyond dark.”
“We tried hard. On that one, we brought in Jonah Nolan to write it. There was a writers’ strike back then. Brought in Christian Bale, you can’t reach much higher than that. We certainly gave it everything we had. A lot of people like that movie. It didn’t quite do what I hoped it was gonna do, and I’ve been living with that wound a long time,” McG said. “There’s a cut out there with an entirely different ending, I just can’t share it with the world yet. It’s beyond dark.”
“It’s interesting because I feel like we did so much right with Terminator but, ultimately, got just enough wrong that we got beat up a little bit by the fanbase and it really, really broke my heart,” continued McG. “And now, strangely, I think the film has started to age better. And there is a different cut: I have my own cut of that film and there’s people online that talk about wanting to see that cut. And that’s interesting! But I think I got a lot of things right with that.”
How did Terminator Salvation originally end?
In the theatrical ending of Terminator Salvation, John Connor (Bale) suffers a fatal heart injury after a battle with a T-800. However, Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a human-terminator hybrid experiment, offers to give his heart up in a transplant, saving Connor as the war against Skynet continues.
Released in the summer of 2009, Terminator Salvation was a critical and commercial failure that failed to launch a new trilogy in the franchise. Subsequent releases, Terminator Genisys in 2015 and Terminator: Dark Fate in 2019, both underperformed as failed attempts to revitalize the franchise with original star Schwarzenegger in his iconic role.
In May 2023, it was reported that James Cameron was developing a script for a Terminator reboot, although it’s unclear exactly what the future holds for the franchise as of now.
