a revised ending for The Terminator

[Johan Larson]

The Terminator could have ended differently. In particular, the fight against the first machine didn't have to be over right then and there. And if the machine had somehow survived, that would have made it easier to devise sequels, since it wouldn't have required any monkeying with the timeline. The quality of the three sequels that followed suggest that perhaps a different path would have been better for the long-term health of the franchise.

So, what might have happened? I'm thinking the point of departure is when Sarah and Kyle flee into the factory from the T-800. Kyle tries to fight it with something like  a big drill, but is knocked aside, hurt and out of the fight. Sarah manages to trick it into some sort of industrial machinery that cuts it off at the thighs. It continues pursuit, dragging itself along on its hands, but Sarah and Kyle are now much faster and are able to escape into a car and drive off. The final scenes have Sarah driving a car along a dark highway with Kyle lying in the back seat, and the T-800 returning to the factory floor to pick up its cut-off legs.

Given this revised ending, what should the next film in the series look like?

[Johnny1A]

I kind of think the first movie ended well.  The problem with the franchise is that there's no natural subsequent story after the second movie, at the end of it (at that time) Sarah, Joh, and the heroic T-800 had defeated Skynet.  Uncreated it.  The story assumption at that time was that the wafer-chip processor from the first T-800 was reverse engineered by Cyberdyne Systems, and Miles Dyson, and that they managed to duplicate it without really understanding it, thus leading to the creation of Skynet.  Once that chip was gone, and Dyson's knowledge with it, no Skynet.

In the original ending to the movie, there was even a scene set well up in the 21C, where Senator John Conner and his mother are living in a healthy, un-nuked world that's on a track to get better.

[Aaron Pollock]

The problem with the franchise is that there's no natural subsequent story after the second movie...

I read something the other day, that T1 and T2 were originally a single script, but James Cameron ended up cutting it in half and only filming the first part, until Arnie managed to hound him into making the rest.

[Johan Larson]

I think to tell many stories in the Terminator setting you need an author comfortable with the notion of multiple timelines. Things can go different ways, and both sides of a major possibility may be open to exploration on screen. And maybe timelines can loop as well as branch. It get complicated quickly.

To be honest I'm not sure there's an audience for such things. How do you tell an audience they are about to watch a movie that starts at the same place the last one did, but 15 minutes in something happens differently, and everything goes differently after that? Sounds like a hard thing to sell.