Two days ago, Screen Rant reported on one of the newest TV Spots for Terminator Salvation. That commercial showed off the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face appeared in the movie in a short scene as the T-800 killing machine.
Why is that significant?
Well, my thoughts were that the folks behind the movie were getting desperate to have people come see the movie in theaters now that it has been out for several weeks in North America and had not lived up even close to where they expected it to be in terms of box office numbers. What does that mean for its potential sequel?
The film had received mostly negative reviews from critics everywhere, the worst out of the franchise. Its opening weekend was weak, coming second to the Night at the Museum sequel and not even coming close to other May openers such as Star Trek, Wolverine and Pixar’s Up. Since then, it dropped off significantly and it continues to do so with big movies opening weekly during the busy summer season. This is especially bad since they went for the PG-13 rating on the film to open it up to the younger movie-going audiences.
With poor reception and poor numbers, the $200 million production budget no longer seems like a good investment. Worse, the franchise is no longer as strong as once thought. Is it the brand name that’s not selling as much? Or could it be that Terminator needs the Governator as the lead?
McG’s Terminator Salvation was supposed to be one of the biggest movies of the year and more than that, it was supposed to be the start of a whole new trilogy of films. Leading up to the release of this fourth installment, there was plenty of talk of ideas for the sequel to Salvation, including having Robert Patrick back for a role in it and everything looked great.
Now, not so much. Will there even be a sequel to Salvation? If there is, will the same creative team be there to make it? Will they pay Christian Bale a ton of money to do it and will McG again direct?
Continue to Page 2 for more on this and and where the sequel will take place…
Will Christian Bale play John Connor in Terminator 5?
For the production of this film, Bale’s demands to alter the script to give him much more screen time could have been the downfall of the movie. He didn’t exactly sell this movie either by just looking at the numbers so far. In the movie, his character was one-dimensional and we all know about the on-set tirade. The altered script took away from what could have been an interesting plot with the Marcus Wright and Kyle Reese characters.
Hindsight is 20/20 and we don’t know definitively what the reason was for the movie’s poor performance. So, let’s look forward instead.
About a month ago, prior to the release of Terminator Salvation, Screen Rant reported on McG’s thoughts of where the sequel would likely go. This is what was said:
“I strongly suspect the next movie is going to take place in a [pre-Judgment Day] 2011… John Connor is going to travel back in time and he’s going to have to galvanize the [sic] militaries of the world for an impending Skynet invasion. They’ve figured out time travel to the degree where they can send more than one naked entity. So you’re going to have hunter killers and transports and harvesters and everything arriving in our time and Connor fighting back with conventional military warfare, which I think is going to be f***ing awesome. I also think he’s going to meet a scientist that’s going to look a lot like present-day Robert Patrick [who famously played the T-1000 in Terminator 2], talking about stem-cell research and how we can all live as idealized, younger versions of ourselves.”
So, the plan is to return to the classic Terminator go back in time plot device and bring what we saw in the future to present day. I can see why they want to do this as it worked for the first three films and it’s interesting to see what futuristic science fiction elements are like when thrown into the modern present day.
Hunter Killers will probably destroy this beautiful scene…
Well, early this morning we heard more on that front. According the Bleeding Cool, their “industry sources” have informed them that the next Terminator installment will in fact see John Connor and the resistance travel back time to London, England. This falls in line with what we heard in the past but we’ll need to wait to see if the next project is greenlit before getting deep into it.
If this happens, expect many tourist attractions to explode.
What do you think of a Terminator 5 and another time travel story?
