Tim Miller’s upcoming Terminator: Dark Fate finds itself in both a unique and familiar position, with the sixth installment in the long-running sci-fi franchise acting as the third attempt at relaunching the brand in only ten years, while also boasting the long-awaited returns of both James Cameron and Linda Hamilton to the series they helped establish as one of the biggest in Hollywood.
There hasn’t been a truly great Terminator movie since the last time Cameron and Hamilton were involved, and that was all the way back in 1991 when Judgment Day altered the blockbuster landscape forever. However, we’ve also been burned by enough disappointing follow-ups since then that expectations for Dark Fate have been tempered, with the movie set to deliver a fairly soft opening at the box office.
The key creatives involved in the project have been keen to distance themselves from everything that’s happened since Terminator 2, although it seems that every new movie featuring the T800 is intended to launch a new trilogy. Deadpool director Miller has claimed that Dark Fate will bring a definitive end to Sarah Connor’s arc while also serving as a direct and faithful sequel to Cameron’s classic work on the franchise, and it seems that as a result of tying up all these long-running story threads, Dark Fate will be the second-longest Terminator movie to date, behind only Judgment Day.
The British Board of Film Classification recently revealed that Terminator: Dark Fate clocks in at 128 minutes, which is only a shade behind T2‘s franchise-high 137 minute runtime. While that isn’t particularly long for a modern studio blockbuster, it comfortably outstrips the 109 minutes of Rise of the Machines and 115 minutes of Salvation, and is only two minutes longer than the critically-reviled Genisys. Here’s hoping that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest return to his signature role is closer in quality to the first two movies than what’s followed since.
