While Terminator: Dark Fate ignores the events of all but the first two films in the long-running sci-fi franchise, the filmmakers still looked to the last three films for inspiration.
Terminator co-creator James Cameron, who returned to produce and co-wrote the upcoming sixth installment, has been open about the fact that the filmmakers actively sought to avoid the mistakes of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation and Terminator: Genisys by studying where the previous films had gone wrong. For Cameron, the problems lay within the pacing and lack of urgency and direction in the three Terminator movies he had not directed or co-written.
"One of the things that seemed obvious from looking at the films that came along later was that we would need to get everything back to the basics and that we would need to avoid the mistakes of making things overly complex and that we needed to avoid stories that jumps around in time and one that goes backward and forward in time," Cameron explained in an interview with Deadline. "Let’s keep it simple in the relative unity of time. With the story, let’s have the whole thing play out in 36 hours or 48 hours. In the first two movies everything plays out in less than two days in each one so there’s energy and momentum."
In order to avoid the same mistakes, Dark Fate looks to have a less complicated, convoluted plot and faster pacing to match the first two films in the series, directed and co-written by Cameron, to keep everything more straightforward than its immediate predecessors.
Directed by Tim Miller and produced by James Cameron, Terminator: Dark Fate stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Mackenzie Davis, Gabriel Luna, Natalia Reyes and Diego Boneta. The film opens Nov. 1.