10 Risky Movie Moments That Totally Failed
6. Killing John Connor - Terminator: Dark Fate
It's tough to recall a film torpedoing its own potential more quickly than Terminator: Dark Fate, which in its first three minutes quite literally terminated fan interest in most everything that followed.
Dark Fate committed the cardinal sin of killing off the series' focal hero in a misguided attempt to basically soft-reboot the franchise with a new protagonist.
An opening 1998 flashback shows a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) being shot and killed by another T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) sent back through time by Skynet, wiping him out before he can became the great leader of the human Resistance.
Given that the first two Terminator movies were entirely concerned with ensuring John's birth and survival, to murder him in the new film's very first scene and then swiftly introduce a replacement Resistance leader, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), understandably left a sour taste in the mouths of long-suffering fans.
To deliver a direct sequel to Terminator 2 only to kill off its most cherished character? Nah, this ain't it. Couple this with a ludicrously huge $196 million budget and it's no surprise at all that Dark Fate sank like a stone at the box office.