James Cameron He is in the middle of a promotional campaign for ‘Avatar: The Sense of Water’, but that doesn’t mean that in some films they ask him about other works in his filmography, including those in which he was not even a director. That has led him to explain the reason you think you failed ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’.
“It was our own myopia”
Well known are the disagreements he had with Tim Miller, director of the film, during its production, but Cameron himself makes it clear that the relationship between the two is once again cordial. However, both wanted different things when making it and that was what led to an insurmountable error according to the author of ‘Titanic’:
I think the problem, and it’s my fault, is that I refused to do it without Arnold. Tim didn’t want Arnold, but I was like, “Look, I don’t want that. Arnold and I have been friends for 40 years, and I could hear it, and it would be like, ‘Jim, I can’t believe you’re making a Terminator movie without me. ‘”. It just didn’t mean much to me to do it, but I said, “If you guys could see your path clear to bringing Arnold back and then, you know, I’d be happy to be involved.”
And then Tim wanted Linda. I think the movie could have survived with Linda in it, I think it could have survived with Arnold in it, but when you put Linda and Arnold in it and then, you know, she’s 60-something, he’s 70-something, so Suddenly it wasn’t your Terminator movie, it wasn’t even your father’s Terminator movie, it was your grandfather’s Terminator movie. And we didn’t see that. We loved it, we thought it was cool, you know, that we were doing this kind of direct sequel to a movie that came out in 1991. And the young audience wasn’t born. They wouldn’t even have been born for another 10 years.
So it was our own myopia. We grew up a bit, and I think that’s the lesson.
The truth is that Cameron’s approach makes sense, since that decision marked the film a lot instead of bringing it closer to a new audience. He was one of the few principals involved who had not commented on the tremendous box office hit of ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ and it is hard to argue with his reasoning.
That being said, I also believe that the film did not deserve to become one of the biggest flops in movie history, causing losses of more than 100 million dollars. Now it will be necessary to see if the franchise manages to rise from its ashes, but only two options occur to me. The first is a film with a more contained budget in a commitment similar to that of ‘Predator: La Presa’. The other is that it is directed by Cameron himself, which is quite unlikely.