Emilia Clarke claims “no one had a good time” when making ‘Terminator’
One of pop culture’s favoured methods for defining insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting the results to be different. Emilia Clarke experienced this in hindsight when she became one of many names to try and fail to rehabilitate the Terminator franchise.
Even though the long-running sci-fi saga hasn’t yielded a great movie since 1991, Hollywood has repeatedly tried – and failed – to recapture the magic of James Cameron’s classic 1984 original. Not just that, the industry has also sought to revive its game-changing sequel, Judgement Day.
Jonathan Mostow’s Rise of the Machines did a decent enough job of trying to pick up the baton. However, three failed reboots in the space of a decade offered compelling evidence that maybe it’s time for Terminator to go away for at least a long time, if not altogether.
Harking back to the aforementioned definition of insanity, McG’s Salvation, Alan Taylor’s Genisys, and Tim Miller’s Dark Fate were all released within ten years of each other, and every single one of them was heralded as the beginning of a brand new trilogy that would define the Terminator mythology for a brand new generation. The only thing they had in common was that they did the complete opposite, with Clarke self-aware enough to admit things didn’t go to plan.
Stepping into Linda Hamilton’s iconic shoes, the Game of Thrones veteran played Sarah Connor in Taylor’s time-tampering fifth instalment. Still, behind-the-scenes issues plagued the production to the extent the actor even said she was “relieved” that it didn’t perform well enough at the box office to warrant any sequels.
Telling Vanity Fair that director Taylor was “eaten and chewed up” on the film, Clarke confirmed that he was far from the only one to have a miserable experience. “He was not the director I remembered,” she said. “He didn’t have a good time. No one had a good time.”
Following Genisys‘ theatrical debut in July 2015, two additional sequels were even awarded release dates in May 2017 and June 2018. After that, the plug was pulled, and Cameron was drafted back into the fold for Dark Fate, which marked the third consecutive Terminator reboot in a decade that failed to launch.
Clarke may have been relieved that her contractual obligations weren’t required to be fulfilled, but the same can also be said of Taylor. “I had lost the will to make movies,” he conceded, referring to both Genisys and Marvel Studios’ Thor: The Dark World. “I lost the will to live as a director. I’m not blaming any person for that. The process was not good for me. So I came out of it having to rediscover the joy of filmmaking.”
Looking at how little its director and one of the movie’s two leads enjoyed themselves, it would have almost been cruel for Genisys to perform in line with commercial expectations and launch a three-film story arc.
