By the time the wheels on Terminator: Dark Fate started turning, the series was already on life support. Since James Cameron left the series after T2: Judgment Day, the war between Sarah Connor and Skynet’s metalline assassins have been characterized by a sense of purposelessness. Rise of the Machines lacked the grace and precision of Cameron’s imagination, while the ambitions of The Sarah Connor Chronicles were upset by strikes and low viewership, the leaden Salvation wasted the promise of a wartorn futurescape, and, in a low point for the series, Genisys was a cartoonish, vapid nostalgia grab that all-but buried hope for ingenuity returning to the series.
Nobly, Tim Miller’s Dark Fate attempted to reset the timeline and scrapped everything to do with Genisys — something that would feel forgivable if it didn’t come after a paltry four-year gap. The result would end in a devastating box office flop: On a crazy inflated budget of somewhere in the $190 million range, Dark Fate is calculated to have lost $122.6 million.
