Review essay Relics from a deleted timeline: The economics of Terminator Genisys

We’re marooned, the three of us.

We’re exiles in time.

John Connor in Terminator Genisys

In October 2015, The Hollywood Reporter released the news that given the poor domestic box-office showing of the previous summer’s Terminator Genisys, the future of one of the most important and influential sf film franchises of the last three decades has been put ‘on hold indefinitely’. The article further reported that the film’s producer, David Ellison – bankrolled by his father, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, whose Northern California headquarters are the model for the Cyberdyne buildings featured in the film’s climactic battle sequence – had already had in the works two sequels and a television spin-off, all part of his dream of using the franchise to make his company, Skydance Media, ‘another Marvel’ (Masters). While talk subsequently emerged of a ‘re-adjusting’ of the series, in late January, Paramount officially removed the film’s sequel from its 2017 release schedule: ‘Instead, the studio said Baywatch will open in its place’ (McClintock). While the news does not mean definitively that the franchise, and its star Arnold Schwarzenegger, will not ‘be back’ – grossing only US$89 million domestically, its much higher international revenues (US$350 million), largely from the increasingly important market of China, as well as DVD sales, might be enough to encourage a future green-lighting of at least parts of Ellison’s ambitious project – the question of why Terminator Genisys did so poorly with its US audience, especially given the popularity of the earlier films, may now be one of the most interesting things about it. This in turn raises significant questions both about the cultural work performed by popular sf practices and about why we are, and should continue to be, so interested in them.

Shortly after the film’s 1 July release, Scott Mendelson speculated in Forbes on the combination of factors that led to the film’s lack of box office success (reminding us too of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s still timely adage that, whatever else these cultural texts may be, they are also ‘nothing but business. … They call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors’ incomes quell any doubts about the social necessity of their finished product’ (95)). These factors included poor marketing, a glut of early negative reviews, the fact that it was released too closely on the heels of the even more family friendly Jurassic World (Trevorrow US 2015) and Inside Out (Docter and Carmen US 2015), the decision to tone down its violence to get a PG-13 rating (and thereby encourage more marketing tie-ins) and declining interest in the film’s primary box-office draw, Schwarzenegger. Most importantly, Mendelson declares that the audience’s response to the film indicates ‘America didn’t want or care about another Terminator movie’. Mendelson further asserts that Terminator Genisys ‘represents one of the ugliest trends in modern Hollywood today. To wit, just because a movie or a franchise was momentarily popular back in the 1980s or the 1990s doesn’t mean that moviegoers young and old want to see another variation in a theater’.

And yet, as Mendelson also notes, the case is not as straightforward as it seems, as earlier in the summer, another sf film franchise, which had seemingly long ago slid into mass cultural insignificance, was successfully revived with the box-office smash, Jurassic World. (Jurassic World turned out to be the second highest grossing film released in 2015, behind only Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams US 2015) – itself, needless to say, very much ‘another variation’ – and made more than seven times as much as Terminator Genisys (‘2015 Domestic Grosses’).) Moreover, this occurred in a film that cynically flaunts the fact that it has no aspirations to be anything more than an amusing spectacle, playing to its audience’s desires for quick and easy thrills; in an exchange with the film’s ostensible hero, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt...