For the last few years the director of Terminator Salvation, Joseph McGinty Nichol AKA ‘McG’, has made it clear that he would like to release a definitive Director’s Cut which would make the 2009 PG-13 film darker and restore John Connor‘s death.
McG has previously touched upon some of his regrets regarding the fourth Terminator movie but when asked by The Hollywood Reporter what he would do differently, if given another chance, McG stated that he would restore the originally planned darker ending.
“What would you do differently if you were to tackle that title again?”
The Hollywood Reporter
“I would have stuck with the dark ending that we photographed that got cut. There’s a lot about that film that people enjoyed. And, technically, we pushed some things forward. You can’t have a better actor than Christian Bale. And Sam did what he needed to do, and [we had] Helena Bonham Carter, and Bryce Dallas Howard. We tried to stack the deck. I tried, Terminator faithful, I tried.”
McG told THR
So what exactly was the intention of that darker ending?
Terminator Salvation’s Original Darker Ending
“Connor dies, okay? He’s dead, and Marcus offers his physical body, so Connor’s exterior is put on top of his [Marcus’] machine body.
It looks like Connor, but it’s really Marcus underneath. And all of the characters we care about (Kyle Reese, Connor’s wife Kate, etc.) are brought into the room to see him and they think it’s Connor. And Connor gets up and then there’s a small flicker of red in his eyes and he shoots Kate, he shoots Kyle, he shoots everybody in the room. Fade to black. End of movie. Skynet wins. Fuck you!”McG told EW
Although the studios reportedly did sign off on the darker ending; we know that Terminator Salvation actually began life as an R Rated project, and maybe this ending was sacrificed for a PG-13 rating and a more open end for the (planned) trilogy to continue with John Connor as the hero.
McG is unsure if he made a mistake by not running with the bleak ending, but I’m not so sure that it was a mistake. Had Terminator Salvation been a one off, and an end to the franchise… then sure, but continuing on would have been messy and would have needed some very smart ideas to continue on.
“It’s the most nihilistic thing of all time. And Christian went fucking crazy, of course. He was insistent that it be done that way! He wanted the bad guys to win! Can you imagine the oxygen going out of the theater?! What just happened! It would piss you off! But maybe two years from now, you’d think it was ballsy. But in the end, it just felt like too much of a bummer… Maybe we blew it.”
McG told EW
It’s been over two years since young John Connor was shotgunned to death by a T-800 at the start of Terminator: Dark Fate,- did the majority think that was a ballsy move? Most fans don’t, and it could have been the same with Terminator Salvation’s original ending. A Frankenstein’s monster John Connor ruling the resistance sounds okay-ish as a ‘what if’ scenario, but in the long term? It could have ended up being just another exercise in futility; shock tactics are a poor substitute for quality progression.
McG reveals that they did test the scene out with fans and people in ‘chatgroups’ – people the studios wanted to enlist to steer Terminator Salvation into good favor with the wider fanbase.
“We were testing it in secret, on the Warner Bros. lot. I purposely brought in some Terminator faithful, some people who were in chatgroups, and they had pushback. Me and [former Warners film exec Jeff] Robinov looked at each other like, “Fuck.” And I really thought we had the tiger by the tail up to that point. And it’s not that the movie tanked. It just didn’t do as great as we wanted it to. And it wasn’t as fondly considered as we wanted it to be at the time.”
McG told THR
However, Christian Bale was also seemingly convinced that the darker ending was the right way to go, so perhaps there was something more to that outcome, something which had potential and could have been utilized in the final cut (if not in its entirety)… ?
“I’m not the director, there came to be a different option that almost everyone, except myself, felt was the better way to go. I took a bit of convincing, but you know, at the end of the day, you need a director to make that call.”
Christian Bale told EW
Bale was asked by EW if the ending would have been too much of a ‘bummer’ for fans, or box office suicide:
“Done the way I saw it? No. But am I disappointed with this one? No.”
Christian Bale told EW
If McG gets his new darker cut of Terminator Salvation then perhaps the best bet would be to give fans the R Rated version of the movie, and have the ending remain optional in much the same way that Terminator fans can take or leave T2’s Future Coda alternative ending.
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