10 Iconic Movie Characters Weirdly REPLACED In Movie Sequels

While fans were understandably upset that franchise protagonist John Connor (Edward Furlong) was suddenly killed off at the start of Terminator: Dark Fate in order to pave the way for a new resistance leader, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), at least it's easy enough to trace the cold, cynical logic of a studio wanting to soft-reboot their franchise.

What made a lot less sense was the head-scratcher of a decision to take the series' overpowering AI antagonist, Skynet, which was quite literally embodied as a character by Matt Smith in Terminator Genisys, and give it a lousy, pointless reboot.

In Dark Fate, Skynet is declared defeated due to the efforts of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and company at the end of Terminator 2, only for a functionally identical AI villain named Legion to take its place and assume the exact same humanity-threatening role.

Given that Legion is an infinitely more generic and uninteresting name than Skynet, and the machines it produced looked incredibly similar to the Skynet Terminators, this felt like a totally pointless change intended only to create a defined gap between the Terminator era of old and new.

For a film that wanted to be a direct sequel to T2 while disregarding all other sequels, replacing Skynet with Legion ironically only underlined how aggressively this "legacy sequel" was a glorified soft reboot.