10 Biggest Mistakes Terminator Genisys Has Already Made

5. Spending $170 Million On An Irrelevant Franchise

Terminator was never meant to be a blockbuster series - the first movie was made for a fifth of what Ghostbusters, released the same year, cost - and any 21st Century attempts to make it into one have failed. You see, while in terms of relevance the series has, if anything, a more potent point now than it did in 1984 - in The Terminator the most invasive role a machine played in everyday life was an answering machine, whereas now computers enhance every part of society - as a media property it doesn't have the heft (outside of long-term fans) to rival the mega-franchises. The entire idea that Terminator is a Star Wars or Jurassic Park-level nostalgia property in terms of box office clout is based purely on that fact that Judgement Day was, for a time, the most expensive movie ever made. That's it. Rise Of The Machines and Salvation severely under-performed, but they're still viewed as anomalies - the industry just won't accept T2's success as a one off. It's fundamentally an issue with approach. New Terminator movies needn't try to be the biggest blockbusters of the year, and yet the franchise is soldiering on as if it's still riding that wave of success it had in the early nineties. Do you know what the target audience of this new movie were doing in the early nineties? Nothing, because they hadn't been born yet.