While the first two films in the long-running Terminator film franchise are widely regarded as classic sci-fi action movies, the reputation of its subsequent follow-ups have seen a mixed reception at best; a view shared by Tim Miller, the director of the upcoming Terminator: Dark Fate.

The sixth installment in the franchise will ignore the events of all but the original two films, directed and co-written by James Cameron, who returned to produce Dark Fate. In an interview with Total Film, Miller admitted the franchise has since become tainted in the eyes of the fans and speculated where previous installments may have gone wrong.

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"I think the brand has been tainted a little bit," he explained. "I don’t want to disparage the work of any of those movies, and some of them were interesting, but I feel like they just played in the world of The Terminator; it was essentially a different thing. T2 was just one of those events that was a fucking revelation. It's one of those films that everyone remembers what they were doing when they first saw it. I still don’t think I realise what I’m doing trying to follow that up."

Cameron revealed he and the writers for Dark Fate had watched Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator: Salvation and Terminator: Genisys -- despite consciously omitting them from the new movie's continuity -- in an effort to determine where they had fallen short and how to avoid making the same mistakes with Dark Fate.

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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.

(via Games Radar)