Dark Fate the latest in the terminator series initially opened to horrible box office numbers, but now it is reported not even international figures were able to save the latest entry. According to the Hollywood Reporter the entry produced by Fox, Paramount, and Skydance at 30% with Tencent picking up the remaining 10% is projected to lose roughly $120 million dollars.

Casually amongst all the news about the feature’s failure was the news the Terminator franchise had been subsequently terminated as a result of the series projected loses.The Hollywood Reporter wrote…

“None of the companies involved would comment on the losses, but sources close to Skydance say there are certainly no plans for another film at this point.”

Insiders Skydance and Paramount agreed that the IP at this juncture is a complete failure with no potential future recovery. Whereas this doesn’t mean the complete end of the franchise, it does mean there will be no future films.

Naturally it wasn’t the wokeness nor was it the disservice the film did to the original source material by retroactively casting Sarah Conner’s struggle into an anti feminine light that caused the failure. No according to analysts it was because of the bad reception the previous films had done to destroy consumer good will.

Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore said…

“The goodwill and brand equity created by the first two Terminator films was arguably undone by the subsequent pre-Dark Fate installments, which may have negatively impacted audience interest in this latest chapter in the series.”

It seems insiders always have a prepared explanation for why anything fails yet any analysis of these excuses reveals their absolute absurdity. If the brand was so badly damaged by the previous two movies which both turned a profit, then how did any analysis from Fox, Paramount, Skydance, or Tencent fail to predict as much and instruct a subsequent marketing campaign to counter the damage done by prevailing entries through the highlighting of the discarding of the previous entries from canon?

We’re expected to believe that not one, not just two, but four companies all experienced gross incompetence on the exact same issue. That’s highly improbable, but if Hollywood wants to keep wasting investors’ money they can’t exactly reveal to them that projects feature immense amounts of progressive narrative elements are extremely likely to fail. At the same time projects that are toxically masculine , celebrate real femininity or just tell a good story by good writers are what the public want.

At the end of the day, right now there is no planned movie and all parties involved are done, but as the Hollywood Reporter details, some are cynical about Hollywood’s lack of creativity. Believing the series will resurrect again in five years for the current year’s direct to video: IE CBS early access. A sentiment that will more likely than not pan out.