Why is it so onerous to make a success Terminator film once more?

Perhaps this stubborn refusal to let the machine go permanently offline hinges on the perplexing open question of the franchise’s underperformance. Why, exactly, is it so hard to make a hit Terminator movie again? Shouldn’t that premise be more renewable, more exploitable?

The Cameron/Arnold factor

Cameron’s lack of involvement hasn’t helped. The average moviegoer might not clock his absence, let alone hold it against an upcoming sequel, but they’d still notice the difference he made, even in ads. Beyond his talents as a filmmaker, Cameron has succeeded in making every new movie of his look like a major event on the horizon. One glimpse of the T-1000 in action was all it took to know that T2 was going to be an unmissable special-effects spectacle, something truly new. None of the Terminator movies since have remotely hinted at the possibility that they’d be taking blockbuster cinema into uncharted territory.

If T2 was an event, the sequels since have been reruns. They all have their faint pleasures — the muscular (if impersonal) action of Rise and Salvation, the geeky time-travel hijinks of Genisys, the general poignancy of Hamilton’s performance in the otherwise unremarkable Dark Fate. But in ways big and small, each is plainly operating in the shadow of the second movie.

With T2, Cameron performed maybe the most dramatic level up in blockbuster history, putting every element of his lean, mean, low-budget 1984 original on steroids. He also found an irresistible sequel hook that couldn’t be matched or replicated by the series afterwards: the way T2 flipped the allegiance of The Terminator, putting him on humanity’s side — a reverse heel turn spoiled (perhaps wisely) by the trailers, and made in sync with Schwarzenegger’s development into Hollywood’s then-reigning headliner.

Speaking of Arnold, he’s almost surely the most reliable draw of these movies (he even shows up in Salvation, sort of, as a digital phantom), but he’s also probably the element that most underscores their status as yesterday’s flavor. For Schwarzenegger, T3 was a last hurrah, his final star vehicle before he temporarily traded Hollywood for a career in politics (he’d win the race for California governor just a few months later). It certainly felt like a big deal in 2003: the one-time biggest action hero in the world returning to the series that helped earn him that title. But the film’s inability to top the previous movie also felt like a reality check on his stardom — an early sign that an actor who had climbed to fame on the strength of his, well, strength would not maintain his same ability to open a picture as time took its toll on his physique.

The later sequels have openly acknowledged this reality; it’s arguably the most interesting, endearing thing about them. Obsolescence becomes text and subtext as a perfect manlike specimen, a robotic Hercules, grapples aloud with his deteriorating physicality. The later movies are even forced to turn the toll age has taken on Schwarzenegger into a plot point, explaining why a perfect cybernetic weapon would have the body of a man in his 50s, then 60s, and now 70s. Again, it’s a fascinating turn for The Terminator to take. But are audiences really stoked to see Hollywood’s ultimate icon of rippling masculinity age slowly out of his action-figure appeal?

Perhaps Terminator has always just been a movie franchise of a certain age, not as easily thrown into another as its temporally displaced heroes and villains have been. The peak popularity of the series is inextricably tied to Schwarzenegger’s heyday, and maybe to the special-effects renaissance of the late 1980s and early ’90s. More than that, maybe the series captured a very specific moment in the history of technological anxiety — a time when it felt like we were dangling on the cusp of complete reliance on computers. Cameron, back then, could still issue warnings about the future.