10 Sci-Fi Movie Deaths That Came Out Of Nowhere
7. John Connor - Terminator: Dark Fate
Terminator: Dark Fate may have been the best - or rather, least-worst - Terminator movie for over 15 years, but many fans were left immediately infuriated by its extremely controversial opening scene.
Dark Fate's first scene takes place in 1998, where Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and her son John (Edward Furlong) are living the easy life in Guatemala after having seemingly averted Judgment Day forever at the end of Terminator 2.
But because sequels need to happen, a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) shows up and hastily murders John, setting in motion a "sequel" which basically acts as a quasi-reboot rehash of the first two films in the series.
Fans were understandably irate that the character around which the entire series revolved was killed off simply to clear the path for a new John Connor substitute, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), all in the hope of giving the Terminator franchise enough life for a new trilogy of films.
It evidently backfired horribly: once word-of-mouth spread that John died in the first four minutes, many fans opted not to watch it, which combined with the disinterest of general audiences, caused the film to bomb spectacularly at the box office.
Given that James Cameron himself vocally protested the deaths of his Aliens characters Hicks (Michael Biehn) and Newt (Carrie Henn) in Alien 3, many found it both hypocritical and in poor taste for him, as a credited story writer on Dark Fate, to give John the same treatment here.
Whatever your own opinion on John's death, it certainly caught everyone off-guard.