James Cameron’s abandoned original idea for ‘Terminator 2’: “Boring, boring, boring”
By 1989, The Terminator was the furthest thing from James Cameron’s mind. After all, he burst onto the scene in Hollywood with the movie, which he described as a sci-fi slasher film, in 1984, but had since gone on to direct Aliens and The Abyss. These films further cemented his status as one of the industry’s best blockbuster directors, but they also meant he had little time to ponder the future of his beloved time-travelling cybernetic organism.
However, when Cameron received a phone call from producer Mario Kassar asking if he was interested in directing a Terminator sequel, he sat up and took notice. Kassar was the co-founder of Carolco Pictures, an independent production company that had just made Total Recall with Cameron’s Terminator star Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it was the Austrian Oak who convinced him to shell out $15million for the rights to the potential franchise.
As Kassar put it to Cameron, they were going to make a sequel with or without him, but if he did want to write and direct it, they’d pay him $6m. Naturally, this garnered the young director’s full attention, with Kassar telling The Ringer, “I have lunch with him at a place called Madeo. And I said, ‘Well, it’s a go. I mean, I already spent the money. You know I’m doing it, so go with God. Go write the script.'”
In terms of ideas for the sequel, Cameron kicked around a couple before getting started with the screenplay. “I basically had two competing ideas,” the Avatar helmer remembered. “One was Skynet sends a Terminator – another Arnold Terminator – to take out John [Connor], and the resistance sends one that’s been reprogrammed. That would’ve been Arnold, too. So, Arnold would become a dark hero character.”
While the idea of having Schwarzenegger play both a good Terminator and a bad Terminator sounds like a recipe for success, Cameron’s co-writer William Wisher wasn’t a fan at the time. “Having Arnold fight another Arnold is just boring. Boring, boring, boring,” he scathingly noted. In the end, this opinion may have been vindicated when the idea came back to the franchise in the woeful fifth entry, Terminator: Genisys, in 2015, but perhaps the less said about that, the better.
Luckily for Wisher, though, he didn’t have to risk upsetting Cameron too much by shooting down his ‘two Arnolds’ idea, because that was only ever the opening salvo of the film in the director’s mind. He envisioned the good Schwarzenegger crushing the bad Schwarzenegger under a truck or grinding his exoskeleton in a large gear structure. At that point, the villainous Skynet would realise its weapon hadn’t got the job done, and it would give the go-ahead to its measure of last resort: an “experimental, one-off super weapon that they’ve created, that even they’re terrified to use.”
This horrifying experimental Terminator eventually became the T-1000 played by Robert Patrick in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, although at this stage of the process, Cameron just referred to it as the “liquid metal robot”. However, because Cameron wasn’t sure which way to go, he took the soon-to-be-iconic character out of the ‘two Arnolds’ story, until he came to his senses and realised he could simply merge his two ideas.
“I thought, ‘Let’s bring that guy back. Let’s make him the adversary,'” he revealed. “Instead of Arnold versus Arnold, it was Arnold versus the scary liquid metal weapon.”
Ultimately, Schwarzenegger returning for the sequel as a hero was already enough of an inversion of the first movie that audiences were taken off guard, and with ILM handling the T-1000’s revolutionary CGI effects, the character became a blockbuster villain for the ages. While it’s likely Cameron could have made his ‘two Arnolds’ idea work a hell of a lot better than it eventually did in Terminator: Genisys, it can’t be denied that he took the correct path with T2, which became one of the greatest Hollywood spectacles in history.
