James Cameron returning to produce Terminator: Dark Fate, as well as the return of original Terminator stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton was seemingly a great idea to continue the story after some lackluster sequels. However, it was not the case and Terminator: Dark Fate became one of the biggest box office disasters of all time with a terminating $123 million loss.
James Cameron outlines why Terminator: Dark Fate failed at the box-office
While discussing a number of topics with Deadline, James Cameron owned up to being a big part of the reason for the movie’s disappointing box office.
He explained:
“I think the problem, and I’m going to wear this one, is that I refused to do it without Arnold. Tim didn’t want Arnold but I said, look, I don’t want that. Arnold and I have been friends for 40 years and I could hear it, and it would go like this: “Jim, I can’t believe you’re making a Terminator movie without me. It just didn’t mean that much to me to do it, but I said, if you guys could see your way clear to bringing Arnold back and then, you know, I’d be happy to be involved.”
And then Tim wanted Linda. I think what happened is I think the movie could have survived having Linda in it, I think it could have survived having Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she’s 60 something, he’s 70 something, all of a sudden it wasn’t your Terminator movie, it wasn’t even your dad’s Terminator movie, it was your granddad’s Terminator movie. And we didn’t see that. We loved it, we thought it was cool, you know, that we were making this sort of direct sequel to a movie that came out in 1991. And young movie-going audiences weren’t born. They wouldn’t even have been born for another 10 years.
So, it was just our own myopia. We kind of got a little high on our own supply and I think that’s the lesson there.”
