10 Movies That Totally Misunderstood Their Audience
7. Terminator: Dark Fate
The most insane thing about Terminator: Dark Fate is that James Cameron himself worked on the story, and yet it commits the most egregious dramatic sin of the entire series post-T2.
Dark Fate opens by revealing that, three years after T2, John Connor (Edward Furlong) was brutally killed by another T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger), leaving his grieving mother Sarah (Linda Hamilton) to transform into a Terminator-hunting badass.
Given that John Connor has been the heart of the franchise since almost the beginning, it was a major gamble to kill him off, and it simply wasn't something most long-suffering fans responded to.
Considering that Dark Fate introduced a new John Connor-esque hero, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), to take up his mantle, it seemed blindingly obvious that Cameron and director Tim Miller were basically soft-rebooting the series in a deeply cynical and un-creative fashion.
Expecting fans to accept Connor's death was incredibly optimistic, especially with him being so blatantly shuffled out of the way to make room for a young new heroine.
Unsurprisingly Dark Fate consequently flopped, with radioactive word-of-mouth cutting off its box office legs overnight.