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“I think if you track the decision from a storytelling standpoint, it absolutely had to be done this way,” Miller says.

In Judgment Day, Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor — joined by her son John and a reprogrammed T-800 terminator — stopped a machine-led apocalypse by destroying Skynet, the company that in a future first imagined by writer-director James Cameron created an artificial intelligence that wipes out most of mankind.

With Skynet erased, a new AI threat emerges in our future known as Legion and a new heroine, Natalia Reyes’ Dani Ramos. Of course, there’s an even more deadly new terminator, Gabriel Luna’s shape-shifting Rev-9, and a new protector from the future, Mackenzie Davis’ enhanced super-soldier Grace.

The hero John Connor of Cameron’s imagining was irrelevant in this fresh storyline.

“Sarah changed the past, which changed the future. So that future where John was the leader of humanity no longer happens. He’s just this man who has missed his moment in history. What are you going to do? Is he going to be an accountant? Is he going to be working in a bank?

“Any of those is unsatisfying when his real destiny was to be this super soldier who leads humanity. So all those reasons led us to do what we did.”

Miller also said he and Cameron, who returns as executive producer and story consultant, decided to move on from John because his possible story had already been explored in other Terminator sequels.

“The non-Jim movies followed John’s journey. They were about John and what he became. So I felt the myth of John Connor had been pretty well explored. But I always thought the Terminator story has been Sarah’s story… she’s a character that is fuelled by pathos and what better fuel for that than the death of her son? What is going to turn her into this vengeance-filled, broken character? You need that kind of tragedy to give rocket fuel to that character.”