“It was a non-starter”: the movie that taught James Cameron not to get high on his own supply
As the director of three of the four highest-grossing movies in the history of cinema, it would be fair to say James Cameron knows exactly what it takes for a blockbuster to put butts in seats.
That’s without mentioning The Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, or True Lies, all of which made a killing at the box office and helped establish the filmmaker as one of the industry’s greatest exponents of the finest white-knuckle escapism the moving image has ever seen.
He’s got the Midas touch for turning ambitious ideas into spectacle-driven epics that continually push the medium’s technological boundaries to the limit. As a result, ironclad confidence and unshakeable self-belief have become key parts of Cameron’s persona.
Of course, he’s completely entitled and entirely justified in feeling that way because the proof is right there in the numbers. However, he isn’t immune to the odd misstep or two, even if they’ve become few and far between in a career that will always be defined by shattering records.
Not to state the obvious, but nobody other than Cameron has been able to make a great Terminator flick. Rise of the Machines, Salvation, and Genisys have their supporters in varying numbers, but none of the three could hold a candle to the maestro’s seminal first two instalments. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why the hype for Dark Fate reached a fever pitch before its release.
It marked Cameron’s return to the franchise for the first time since 1991, with the filmmaker co-writing and producing a legacy sequel to Judgment Day that brought back Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton. Unfortunately, the end result was a catastrophic box office bomb that lost a fortune, and he placed a lot of the blame on himself.
Coming clean to Empire that servicing his own duology led to him “getting high on my own supply,” Cameron confessed that he told Dark Fate‘s director he was the issue. “I’ve owned this to Tim Miller many times,” he admitted. “I said, ‘I torpedoed that movie before we ever wrote a word or shot a foot of film.”
“We made a legit sequel to a movie where the people that were actually going to theatres at the time that movie came out are all either dead, retired, crippled, or have dementia,” he matter-of-factly stated of the perils that came with making the sequel to a film that released in the early ’90s in the late 2010s. “It was a non-starter. There was nothing in the movie for a new audience.”
Dark Fate did go heavy on nostalgia to the detriment of the story it was trying to tell, with Cameron pointing the finger squarely at himself for the reverence towards his own previous work having a monumentally detrimental impact on Miller’s contributions to the Terminator mythos.
