2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate was widely considered a failure after a poor performance at the box office. However, filmmaker James Cameron thinks the film was good, and puts it high up the Terminator rankings.
Speaking to Empire Magazine, Cameron said that Dark Fate is the third-best Terminator movie, slotting in just behind his two movies that catapulted the franchise into icon status. As for what went wrong, Cameron chalks up the movie’s failure to the fact that people just didn’t show up.
What did James Cameron say about Terminator: Dark Fate?
“Personally, I think that’s as good as anything that we did back then. […] We achieved our goal,” said Cameron. “We made a legit sequel to a movie where the people that were actually going to theatres at the time that movie came out are all either dead, retired, crippled, or have dementia. It was a non-starter. There was nothing in the movie for a new audience […] Our problem was not that the film didn’t work. The problem was, people didn’t show up. I’ve owned this to [director] Tim Miller many times. I said, ‘I torpedoed that movie before we ever wrote a word or shot a foot of film.'”
Dark Fate was directed by Tim Miller, who infamously had creative differences with Cameron during the production of the film. Cameron also touched on those reports, noting that Miller’s original cut was “pretty rough” and that editing the film took some time.
“I felt there were a lot of pathways that were taken that were unnecessary,” Cameron said. “I’m an editor myself, so I gave notes that were both broad and very specific. I continued in that process up to about two and a half months ago when we locked picture … I was very involved in the writing and I was very involved in the cutting of the film. And to me, the cutting is really an extension of the writing.”
Starring Linda Hamilton in a return to the series, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mackenzie Davis, Natalia Reyes, Gabriel Luna, and Diego Boneta, Dark Fate launched to mostly negative reviews and was a massive box office failure. Grossing just $261.1 million worldwide, the film lost $122.6 million, making it one of the biggest box-office bombs of all time.
(Source: Empire Magazine)
