If there’s any series/franchise ripe for a true comeback: It’s The Terminator.
It’s pretty widely agreed that every movie after 2, which is over 30 years old now, kinda sucks to varying degrees (Tho 3 might have it’s moments).
They’ve tried to soft-reboot it not just once, but twice, both being pretty abysmal failures.
In the right hands, I think it’s very possible for there to be another critically-acclaimed and successful Terminator movie, I don’t think it’s impossible.
The problem with the Terminator franchise is that it involves some ongoing, ever-evolving conflict between Skynet/AI and humanity, and every movie is expected to evolve that conflict to some degree. With Predator, all you need to know is that there’s a race of aliens who hunt humans like game animals. You can watch them in any order.
If you did a similar “side story” for Terminator , you’d have to explain where in the story timeline you are (which would require familiarity with the world), or find some way to explain it (which would slow down the story and make the movie feel unsatisfying since none of the overarching conflict is resolved). It might be possible, but I can’t imagine a studio greenlighting another Terminator film without trying to find some way to emulate elements of the previous films, which would over-complicate and ruin it. Predator films are all just “alien hunts humans”, and you can slap that anywhere, any time. That’s why Prey worked.
It’s definitely a significantly different beast compared to the Predator series. I think the only real way to make it work is completely reboot the timeline, a hard reboot, and just tell a new story akin to the 1st Terminator. I think the main reasons the movies after 2 have failed is because they all tried to stay in the same general universe with Arny and whatnot.
The solution
Every movie has SkyNet going after another link in the Connor family tree
It tries and fails with Sarah Connor, so it goes after her Father, then his mother and then her father on and on and on until it’s Terminator versus Synapsids in the Permian Era
Terminator kicks that fish thing back into the ocean when it tries crawling on land for the first time
I think the problem with Terminator as a franchise is that time travel becomes too complicated as a plot device after a while. Terminator and T2 just use it to hang an action movie premise on, but that only works for two movies before the concept just runs out of steam. Some of the later movies might have been on to something by just having them be war movies set in the future, but they got too weird and complicated for their own good.
