8 Small-Scale Movies That Blew Up Into Blockbuster Action Franchises

The original Terminator was a near-perfect sci-fi movie, using its meager budget of $6 million to craft a gritty, scaled-down story about an impending apocalypse. Its tight pacing and grim aesthetic made The Terminator a constrained, almost claustrophobic action movie.

Despite his success playing Conan in two films, Arnold Schwarzenegger was hardly a household name, and as such, his lack of fame made him the perfect robot assassin.

By the time Terminator 2 came out seven years later, Schwarzenegger was the most famous action star on the planet and James Cameron was riding high off the success of Aliens and The Abyss. That combination alone caused the studio to throw cash at the production with reckless abandon, resulting in one of the most revolutionary action movies of all time.

That giant budget allowed for some truly innovative special effects, along some of the best cinematography of the decade. Audiences were smitten with Arnie's antics at this point, and the character of Sarah Connor became one of the most influential heroines of all time. It remains the most beloved instalment of the series, killing it at the box office and raking in half a billion dollars internationally.

And while none of the future instalments were able to match that sheer profit - or that level of unanimous acclaim - they all performed incredibly at the box office, pulling in roughly $2 billion in total. With two more sequels still in the works, this blockbuster franchise doesn't look to be going away anytime soon.