10 More Sequels That Totally Ruined The Previous Movie's Ending

Terminator: Dark Fate may technically be the sixth Terminator movie, but it was mounted as a direct sequel to the last great film in the series, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and so in turn ignored the three subsequent sequels.

That was all well and good, except Dark Fate's opening scene committed quite the cardinal, fan-alienating sin in an attempt to jolt the ailing franchise back to life.

After the first two films had been centered so explicitly around the fight to keep Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and her son John (Edward Furlong) - aka the future leader of the human resistance - alive, Dark Fate tossed it all away by killing John at the very beginning.

The instigating scene takes place three years after the events of T2, where on a beach in Guatemala Sarah and John are attacked by another T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) which has been sent back through time, and which successfully kills John this time.

It was certainly a bold choice, albeit one which upset many fans, who felt that John was the heart and soul of the series. 

That the rest of the movie was more-or-less a soft reboot of the Terminator franchise with a new resistance leader character, Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), didn't exactly do much to justify killing John either.

As such it's not terribly surprising that word-of-mouth about John's fate further tanked the film's already poor box office prospects, in turn putting the big-screen iteration of the franchise on ice for the foreseeable future.