At the end of the day the movie industry is all about making money, so based on that single metric alone, we can confidently call Terminator: Dark Fate a total, complete, and absolute disaster.
Despite boasting the returns of franchise icons James Cameron and Linda Hamilton on either side of the camera, not to mention the best reviews the flagging sci-fi series had seen since all-time classic Judgement Day almost 30 years previously, the sixth installment was a colossal flop.
By the time the dust had settled, the $185 million R-rated actioner wound up losing a reported $120 million for Paramount, marking the third failed reboot in the space of a decade. Star Mackenzie Davis admitted a while back that fans had probably lost interest in the Terminator mythos, but that doesn’t mean she considers the project a failure.
During an interview with Collider, the actress (who also starred in acclaimed blockbuster bomb Blade Runner 2049), shared her thoughts on starring on two buzzy titles that went down in a ball of commercial flames.
“That’s been a lot of the stuff I’ve been a part of. It’s not that they’ve been failures. I’ve been a part of the coolest sh*t! But a lot of stuff that I’ve done, that I’ve loved hasn’t been an enormous zeitgeisty success and that is fine. I love the stuff that I’ve been a part of. And some stuff has. Some stuff surprises you where you’re like, ‘Wow, Episode 3 of Black Mirror is the one that’s changing my life in a weird way?”
We’re almost certainly getting another new iteration of Terminator eventually, but the dwindling enthusiasm has made it perfectly clear that anybody brave enough to step up to the plate really needs to knock it out of the park to avoid yet another failure.