Before Paramount Pictures and Skydance Entertainment attempted to reboot the Terminator franchise into a new trilogy with last year’s Terminator: Dark Fate, Paramount and Skydance also attempted to reboot the Terminator franchise into a new trilogy with 2015’s Terminator Genisys.
Mauled by critics, Genisys grossed $440 million worldwide, thanks in no small part to its strong performance in China, but that wasn’t enough to convince the studio not to pull the plug on the two sequels which it had previously dated for 2017 and 2018.
Now, speaking to The Production Meeting Podcast (via Dark Horizons), screenwriter Patrick Lussier has offered some insights into what was planned for the second and third instalments of the trilogy:
“We wrote like two drafts of the next one, the direct sequel, and had an outline for the third one, what that would be, that answered all the questions that were presented in Genisys and brought it back around and closed it all off. They dealt more with how the future and where Skynet comes from and what that sort of time loop is. You know, the Matt Smith character.
“It became much more of a focus, so they were probably a little trippier and stood away from T2 a little more. Started having their own identity. There’s sort of an interesting escaping the fatalistic part of it, how it opened was very cool… who knows? Maybe one day they’ll release it as a comic or something.”
Given that Dark Fate managed to pull in just $261 million in total, losing around $130 million for the studios involved and effectively killing the Terminator franchise, one has to wonder whether Skydance and Paramount regret the decision to axe the Genisys sequels.
Do you regret it? Would you have liked to see the Genisys story continue, or has the Terminator franchise already been flogged to death? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
