Paramount has removed a planned Terminator sequel from its release schedule for 2017, after last year’s reboot of the cyborg franchise underwhelmed at the box office.

Terminator: Genisys was meant to be the first film in a new trilogy uniting original star Arnold Schwarzenegger with younger actors Emilia Clarke and Jai Courtney. It was released last summer to middling reviews (the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called it “intensely unnecessary”) and underperformed at the US box office, bringing in less than $90m (£64m).

But its surprising global pick-up (it made around $350m outside the US) meant that a new Terminator 2 still seemed like a possibility. Paramount have now decided otherwise, with a summer 2017 date vacated and replaced with Dwayne Johnson’s Baywatch movie.

Paramount had also ambitiously scheduled a new Terminator 3 for June 2018, as North American rights to the franchise would revert to series creator James Cameron in 2019. The studio is now pinning its franchise hopes on the continuation of the Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and Transformers films. This year will also see a reimagining of video horror The Ring, hope for some JJ Abrams’ magic in spin-off 10 Cloverfield Lane and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.

The studio is also hoping its Baywatch adaptation will appeal to younger audiences unfamiliar with the original, bringing in Zac Efron as Johnson’s co-star.

“We’re going to make it badass, but we still want to pay homage to the original show, so it’s really a careful combination,” Efron said to MTV last year. “We’re going to beat up some dudes, and swim a lot.”