10 Movies Totally Ruined By Fan Service

8. Terminator: Dark Fate

The Terminator franchise is practically defined by fan service: even as early as the incredible second film, it was happily making cute callbacks to the 1984 original, but at least T2 had the incredible writing, directing and acting to back it up.

Ever since, the series has increasingly used its prior successes as a stepping stone to lure audiences back, culminating in the spectacularly embarrassing nostalgia-fest Terminator Genisys, and just recently the reboot-sequel Terminator: Dark Fate.

Dark Fate's selling point was that it pressed the reset button on all the post-T2 movies, wiping them from the continuity and aiming to deliver the "true T3."

Except, all that James Cameron and Tim Miller have really done is put the first two movies in a blender, add some scattered new ingredients and serve it up once again to a fatigued fanbase.

The film literally opens with a highly controversial sequence which undoes one major aspect of Terminator lore, after which it becomes a lazy reprise of T2, rife with lame dialogue callbacks to the first two movies, action sequences that feel like hollow rip-offs, and even exact shots which are cut-and-pasted near-wholesale from T2 in particular.

And even with solid performances from a returning Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dark Fate feels like a film in a perpetual state of identity crisis, wishing to reinvent itself for a new generation all while handcuffing itself to the series' legacy characters and most iconic imagery.

Unsurprisingly Dark Fate has already bombed at the box office worldwide, and if the franchise is truly going to outlive Hamilton and Schwarzenegger, it probably needs to return to the chase movie roots of the original film, with a far lower budget, more practical action and an entirely new cast free of all the insincere fan-baiting.