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11th October 2021 | by Mark Harrison |

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The future is what we make it,

but what about the unmade
Terminator sequels that would
have followed Salvation, Genisys,
and Dark Fate? Mark finds out.

This feature contains spoilers for all

of the Terminator films, including
Dark Fate.

The original Terminator trilogy

comprised three movies released in
three different decades. For all the
flaws with Jonathan Mostow’s
Terminator 3, a well-made sequel
that nevertheless comes up short
next to James Cameron’s films, it’s
probably the best of the post-T2
sequels.

The franchise now numbers six

entries, with the addition of three
different trilogy-starters, distributed
by three different studios, with three
different creative leads, all in little
more than 10 years. Salvation,
Genisys, and Dark Fate were all
intended to kick off sequel trilogies,
but whether it was down to rights
issues or audience apathy, none of
their respective follow-ups came to
pass.

In the workings of a franchise

machine that absolutely will not stop
ever, until we are dead, we can be
thankful that simply remaking the
1984 original remains an unthinkable
option for now. Heck, the series has
tied itself in knots just to keep Arnold
Schwarzenegger involved beyond the
reasonable playing age for a mass-
produced cyborg.

But where would these new creative

directions have taken the series if
they had come to fruition? Here’s our
look back at the Terminator trilogies
that never were…

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Setup: 15 years after Judgment Day,

in the far-off future of 2018, upstart
resistance captain John Connor
(Christian Bale) encounters an
experimental human-Terminator
hybrid named Marcus Wright (Sam
Worthington) who is protecting John’s
teenage father Kyle Reese (Anton
Yelchin) from Skynet.

What went wrong? Despite being

the worst-reviewed movie in the
franchise up to this point, Salvation
was a decent-sized hit at the
worldwide box office in summer
2009. However, when Terminator
rights holders The Halcyon Company
went bankrupt later that year, the
rights changed hands and Salvation‘s
most lasting impression on pop
culture was the ubiquitous leaked
audio of Christian Bale ranting at
cinematographer Shane Hurlbut.

What would have happened

next? Unlike the films that followed,
Terminator Salvation is about as
linear a sequel as you could expect
from such a circular narrative. It
picks up roughly after Rise Of The
Machines left off but feels like more
of a reboot than it ought to because
of casting changes.

As well as being the only entry in the

franchise that doesn’t feature
Schwarzenegger, (outside of a cameo
from a CG double anyway) it’s unique
in its lack of time travel shenanigans.
So, what did director McG have in
mind for the untitled Terminator 5
and 6?

“One of the problems is that in a

post-apocalyptic world, everybody’s a
little bummed out,” he told IGN in
2009. “Everything went haywire. So,
the idea is to play with one of the
tried and true rules of the franchise –
time travel – and introduce it in this
picture.”

In further statements around the

same time, McG suggested a fifth
instalment would play around with
the timeline that was largely
respected in Salvation. This time-
travel adventure was going to send
Bale’s Connor back to a pre-Skynet
2011, the same year as the sequel
was intended to be released. Even
though Salvation acknowledges that
Judgment Day took place in 2003,
the idea was to revisit the
contemporary chase-movie style of
previous instalments.

This needn’t have broken the

franchise, but the minds behind
Terminator 5 also intended to show
Skynet figuring out how to send non-
infiltrator Terminators back through
time, meaning that the war
machinery seen in countless
flashforwards would invade our
present. In case you don’t see what a
bad idea that would be, ask yourself
why they wouldn’t have just sent a
Hunter-Killer back to get Sarah
Connor in 1984, if that ever became
possible?

Speaking of Sarah, McG intended to

retcon her death, which occurred off-
screen before Rise Of The Machines,
and have Linda Hamilton return for
the fifth film. It also would have
featured Robert Patrick as a 60-year-
old scientist who is researching cell
replication, as if a shapeshifter like
the T-1000 would need design
inspiration to begin with.

As it stood, McG had two potential

projects lined up between completing
Salvation and Terminator 5 – one
was a James Cameron-produced
remake of 20,000 Leagues Under The
Sea and the other was a screen
version of the rock musical Spring
Awakening. Neither of those films
materialised, but due to those pesky
rights issues, (which we’ve covered
more extensively elsewhere) neither
did his take on Terminator 5.

After it became apparent that new

rights holders Annapurna Pictures
would be pursuing a new take, with
Schwarzenegger once again front and
centre, Dark Horse Comics released a
12-issue sequel series titled
Terminator Salvation: The Final
Battle. Written by J. Michael
Straczynski, the story picks up
threads involving Connor, Wright, and
Helena Bonham Carter’s Dr Serena
Kogan, and ultimately ties all loose
ends back into the circular narrative
of the rest of the series.

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Setup: Time is in flux during the

dying days of the war against the
machines, as an alternate-universe
version of Skynet (Matt Smith) sends
a Terminator back in time to kill
Sarah Connor as a child. Tumbling
into an alternate 1984, Kyle Reese
(Jai Courtney) discovers that Sarah
(Emilia Clarke) was raised by a
reprogrammed T-800,
(Schwarzenegger) while back in his
own time, John Connor (Jason
Clarke) has also been assimilated.

What went wrong? All editorialising

about the film’s quality aside,
Genisys got an even colder reception
from critics and audiences than its
predecessor. While Alan Taylor’s film
took a leaf out of JJ Abrams’ Star
Trek in a bid to kickstart a rebooted
trilogy, the back-to-back sequels that
had been dated for 19th May 2017
and 29th June 2018 were quietly
removed from Paramount’s slate
after the film underperformed at the
international box office.

What would have happened

next? “For us, this is Terminator 1,
this is not Terminator 5“, said
Annapurna executive David Ellison,
describing the filmmakers’ approach
to the intended trilogy. Despite
bringing Schwarzenegger back into
the fold, Genisys was very much
hyped as the start of a new series
based on Cameron’s original two
films. If nothing else, it’s a curious
move to acknowledge that the film is
overwriting the two cast-iron classics
that kicked off the franchise during
the film – it didn’t prove to be a
popular choice.

Writers Laeta Kalogridis and Patrick

Lussier were charged with coming up
with the new trilogy and while doing
press rounds for Genisys, they were
emphatic in saying that they had a
three-film arc for this new alternate
timeline. Indeed, they claimed that
they knew the last line of the third
movie but were understandably
unwilling to reveal what it was at that
point.

As mentioned, Genisys sets up some

of the questions that would percolate
throughout the next two films, like
where the alternate version of Skynet
had come from (or rather, why he
didn’t bring a fez and a mop to tidy
up this timey-wimey nonsense).
Smith’s role in the finished film
amounted to an extended cameo, but
the mid-credits scene was devoted to
showing that Skynet’s new Genisys
form had survived in 2017, and the
sequels were supposed to explain
where it had come from.

Notably, the film sees our heroes

trying to avert yet another Judgment
Day in 2017, which is when the first
sequel was supposed to turn up.
Unlike the causal loop established
across previous instalments, the
many-worlds version allows for
further alterations to the mythos, so
Kalogridis and Lussier would pretty
much have had free rein on the
sequels.

It’s not too much of a stretch to

imagine that Part 2 would have seen
Judgment Day come to pass again,
with the alternate-universe Skynet
avoiding the mistakes of previous
versions, so that Part 3 could deal
with the immediate aftermath,
perhaps having other characters hop
between timelines too. Although the
sequels were dated and a
complementary TV spin-off series
was announced, the film’s box office
put paid to any plans to answer the
film’s dangling plot threads.

And so, what little else we know

about the planned Genisys sequels
has largely come from the actors
involved. For instance, we know that
Dayo Okeniyi’s Cyberdyne whiz
Daniel Dyson was set to play a larger
part and that JK Simmons filmed
pick-up scenes in Genisys to make it
clearer that his character survived,
ahead of a more important role in the
sequels. But the biggest clue we’ve
had so far comes from Jason Clarke,
who lamented that he didn’t get to
explore the T-5000 version of John
Connor any further.

He told Collider in 2018: “What I

remember was that second one was
going to be about John’s journey
after he was taken by Skynet…like
going down to what he became; half-
machine, half-man. That’s where the
second one was going to start, and
that’s about all I knew. It’s such a
bummer we didn’t get to do that.”

By contrast, his namesake and

screen mother Emilia Clarke was
much more contentto be free of the
Terminator franchise machine,
claiming in a 2018 interview that she
was relieved that the film didn’t do
well. Elsewhere, Ellison brought
James Cameron back on board as a
producer to have another run at the
franchise that made his name…

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Setup: Utilising the same many-

worlds approach to liberally ignore
everything since T2, Dark Fate opens
with a shattering postscript to
Cameron’s last film and then picks up
22 years later, as Sarah Connor
(Linda Hamilton) encounters a new
saviour of humanity, Dani Ramos,
(Natalia Reyes) and her cyborg-
hybrid protector, Grace, (Mackenzie
Davis) on the run from a Terminator
sent by a different, non-Skynet AI
called Legion.

What went wrong? Pivoting from

Trek to Star Wars in its “legacyquel”
tack, the film drew much warmer
reviews all around, but had the
lowest box-office opening of any
Terminator film since the first one in
1984. Many box office
prognosticators blamed franchise
fatigue with the third would-be
trilogy-starter on the bounce, but all
told, Paramount and Skydance Media
declared a loss of $130 million on the
film.

What would have happened

next? As you’d expect from
Cameron, he was a hands-on
producer, proving instrumental in co-
writing the story that Deadpool
director Tim Miller went on to make.
Indeed, before Dark Fate, the
producer reportedly sat down, just as
he has with his as-yet-unreleased
Avatar sequels, to hammer out a
three-film arc with writers Charles H.
Eglee, Josh Friedman, David Goyer,
and Justin Rhodes.

Cameron’s main reason for returning

to the Terminator franchise was to
address the ever more topical
relationship between humans and
artificial intelligence. But by his own
admission, Dark Fate doesn’t get
around to that, instead tacitly
acknowledging the stray timelines of
Salvation and Genisys by suggesting
that some version of this conflict has
happened before and will happen
again, until something fundamentally
changes in that relationship.

He further explained: “We know

where our storyline is going in broad
strokes. The “innate conflict” that the
future Terminator films will have to
resolve, will be the ultimate – and
inescapable – showdown between
humanity and A.I.”

The first sequel was pencilled in for

“early 2022” by producers’ estimates,
but that was before the film turned
out to be a financial write-off. By the
end of Dark Fate, Sarah and Dani
drive off towards an uncertain future,
(again) but behind the scenes at
least, it seems as if Cameron and his
co-writers had made preparations to
ensure that the film worked as a
standalone story, but also that they
didn’t paint themselves into any
corners If the series continued.

The only area in which things seemed

more ambivalent about the sequels
was Schwarzenegger’s return – in its
second half, the film introduces a T-
800 model that feels like the logical
extension of “Uncle Bob” from T2 and
goes to some lengths to start that
this time, he “won’t be back”. And
yet when asked, Cameron cheerfully
said that he could find some way to
bring Arnie back, they gladly would.

However, Dark Fate belatedly brings

the franchise back to the realisation
that Sarah Connor, not the
Terminator, was the protagonist of
the original film, so we’ll leave the
last word to Hamilton. In January
2020, she stated that she’s more or
less finished with the franchise after
the latest film’s underperformance.

She told The Hollywood Reporter “I

would really appreciate maybe a
smaller version where so many
millions are not at stake. Today’s
audience is just so unpredictable. I
can’t tell you how many laymen just
go, ‘Well, people don’t go to the
movies anymore.’ That’s not
Hollywood analysis; that just comes
out of almost everybody’s mouth.

“It should definitely not be such a

high-risk financial venture, but I
would be quite happy to never
return. So, no, I am not hopeful
because I would really love to be
done.”

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