Whedon's open letter to Halcyon proves just why this man should be given the keys to the cyborg car:

An Open Letter to the Terminator Owners. From a Very Important Hollywood Mogul

Dear Sirs/Ma'ams,

I am Joss Whedon, the mastermind behind Titan A.E., Parenthood (not the movie) (or the new series) (or the one where 'hood' was capitalized 'cause it was a pun), and myriad other legendary tales. I have heard through the 'grapevine' that the Terminator franchise is for sale, and I am prepared to make a pre-emptive bid RIGHT NOW to wrap this dealio up. This is not a joke, this is not a scam, this is not available on TV. I will write a check TODAY for $10,000, and viola! Terminator off your hands.

No, you didn't miscount. That's four — FOUR! — zeroes after that one. That's to show you I mean business. And I mean show business. Nikki Finke says the Terminator concept is played. Well, here's what I have to say to Nikki Finke: you are a fine journalist and please don't ever notice me. The Terminator story is as formative and important in our culture — and my pretend play — as any I can think of. It's far from over. And before you Terminator-Owners (I have trouble remembering names) rush to cash that sweet cheque, let me give you a taste of what I could do with that franchise:

1) Terminator... of the Rings! Yeah, what if he time-travelled TOO far... back to when there was dragons and wizards? (I think it was the Dark Ages.) Hasta La Vista, Boramir! Cool, huh? "Now you gonna be Gandalf the Red!" RRRRIP! But then he totally helps, because he's a cyborg and he doesn't give a s#&% about the ring — it has no power over him! And he can carry it AND Frodo AND Sam AND f@%& up some orcs while he's doing it. This stuff just comes to me. I mean it. (I will also offer $10,000 for the Lord of the Rings franchise).

2) More Glau. Hey. There's a reason they're called "Summer" movies.

3) Can you say... musical? Well don't. Even I know that's an awful idea.

4) Christian Bale's John Connor will get a throat lozenge. This will also help his Batwork (ten grand for that franchise too, btw.)

5) More porn. John Connor never told Kyle Reese this, but his main objective in going to the past was to get some. What if there's a lot of future-babies that have to be made? Cue wah-wah pedal guitar — and dollar signs!

6) The movies will stop getting less cool.

Okay. There's more — this brain don't quit! (though it has occasionally been fired) — but I think you get my drift. I really believe the Terminator franchise has only begun to plumb the depths of questioning the human condition during awesome stunts, and I'd like to shepherd it through the next phase. The money is there, but more importantly, the heart is there. But more importantly, money. Think about it. End this bloody bidding war before it begins, and put the Terminator in the hands of someone who watched the first one more than any other movie in college, including "Song of Norway" (no current franchise offer).

Sincerely, Joss Whedon.

For this, Joss is forgiven all of Dollhouse.

(According to the Financial Times, real parties interested in Terminator include Sony, Twilight studio Summit Entertainment, and Media Rights Captial, the people behind Bruno. The rights will be auctioned later this month.)

An Open Letter to the Terminator Owners [Whedonesque] (Link updated, thanks all.)

So now that you've seen it, what do you think? Worth creating a huge public apocalypse and humiliating poor Moon Bloodgood over? I didn't think so either.

To refresh your memory, back in February, McG made Bloodgood stand up (fully clothed) in front of a crowd of Wondercon fans and shouted, "Who wants to see Moon's boobs?" until the crowd roared. McG explained that the studio wanted to cut Bloodgood's topless scene, to keep the movie PG-13. In the roundtables afterwards, they talked up the scene and how great it was:

Afterwards, at the roundtable, McG told us he saw Moon's breasts as expressing the human softness that's what we're fighting the machines for, and they're like the opposite of the hard machine world, but on the other hand maybe it's just a gratuitous juvenile scene that drags down an otherwise serious movie, and that's what he's debating with the studio right now. And Moon herself told reporters the scene is very tasteful and she felt very comfortable with it. And the scene is about knowing you could die soon and wanting to be close to another person, without any barriers in the way. Including clothing.

Did you get all of that from the above clip? No? Then you're obviously an ingrate, who cannot appreciate the subtleties of McG's film-making process. In any case, I'm probably the last person who would object to a little gratuitious nudity or extra trashiness — especially in an already cheesy apocalyptic film, where it mixes in with the shouting and the ridiculous stunts and the nonsensical dialogue. In fact, if Christian Bale had spent the entire movie nude, it might have been the one thing that would have salvaged his performance. But especially after having seen the rest of the film, the auteur-ish temper tantrums over this brief snippet of "Moon's boobs," and the grandiose boob exegeses seem a bit overplayed. Just a tad.

Fall is officially in full effect, which means the big bad summer sci-fi season is over! Now, personally, I set my bar so impossibly high that no film could ever come close to pleasing me unless our lord and saviour Michael Bay himself were to direct it. But perhaps some of you plebs are able to enjoy lesser entertainment - though I fail to see how you can watch anything beyond those low brows of yours. So, now that we've had a little while to absorb and reflect the entertainment we've witnessed, what really was a disaster? So, enjoy a mini "clip-show" to refresh your memory and then vote on what was truly a disaster!


WATCHMEN:



DOLLHOUSE:



TERMINATOR SALVATION:



BSG FINALE:



STAR TREK:



X-MEN ORIGINS - WOLVERINE:



TRANSFORMERS-REVENGE OF THE FALLEN:



GI JOE:



SUMMER GLAU:



DISTRICT 9:



OTHER:



Now go vote... and argue!!!

I also want to use this change in format to bring a little news. For a while now, I've been trying to bring you the best Disaster I can with the time that I have when not busy with other ventures. But, in less than two weeks, I will be welcoming a tiny disaster of my own into the world. So between that and other "official" work that I've been involved in, I will be having far less time to put together a weekly "This is a Disaster". So I am going to take a short hiatus.

I will return, I would just rather promise future greatness than deliver regular mediocrity.


I'll still be lurking around here doing the odd 'shop when time and inspiration meet. But if you want to see what work I'm up too check out my blog. I have big plans for ROACH, so continue to check there periodically. And if you are curious what the fuck I'm going to do with a baby, I just started a new blog that I will do my best to keep up with so follow along there.

Thanks for all your interest so far and I will return before you notice I'm gone.

-Garrison Dean

According to The Wrap, FTI Capital Advisors have been hired by the troubled company to "evaluate strategic alternatives" to bankruptcy, and they've already announced that things aren't as bad as they may seem, if Senior Managing Director Kevin W. Shultz is to be believed:

Based on our extensive due diligence, we believe the value of the Terminator franchise alone is substantially greater than the $30 million Halcyon paid for it in 2007. In our view, Halcyon enjoys a wide variety of strategic options and we intend to explore them all.

Amongst that wide variety is the right of refusal for any movie based on Philip K. Dick's novels. And according to Halcyon, the next Terminator movie is already in development, unaffected by the company's financial situation.

'Terminator's' Halcyon Gets Restructuring Help [The Wrap]

The Sarah Connor Chronicles went off the air last May, and seems unlikely to come back to television. But fans have become increasingly focused on the idea that the show could have a direct-to-DVD movie sequel. The show's creator and showrunner, Josh Friedman, told us back in May that the show was over, and unlikely to be revived.

But fans have kept clamoring for a direct-to-DVD continuation. So we decided to ask producer James Middleton (who also produced Terminator Salvation) if there was any hope whatsoever that fans might get their wish. Have there been any meetings about a direct-to-DVD sequel, or other continuation? Middleton responded via email:

The quick answer is, yes, there have been many discussions. I can't go into more detail about the subject until I have something truly substantial to report. What the fans should know is that I hear them and I too would love to see T:SCC come back in some form.

So it sounds like there's reason to hope after all. At least, the reference to "many discussions" sounds encouraging, as does the notion that Middleton may actually have something "substantial" to report at some point. So fingers crossed!

And here's a better look at that mobile billboard, which drove around near the Warner Bros. studio offices for three days this past week:

Here's a list of all the movies with production budgets of $170 million and over, for the past ten years. (We chose the threshold of $170 million because there were a ton of movies clustered around the $150 million-$160 million mark.) Movies that failed to make back their budget at the U.S. box office are underlined.

2009:

Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince: $250 million

Avatar: $237 million (according to AP)

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: $225 million (according to NY Post)

Terminator Salvation: $200 million

G.I. Joe: The Rise Of COBRA: $175 million

Up: $175 million

2008:

Quantum Of Solace: $230.6 million

Prince Caspian: $225.6 million

Iron Man: 186.5 million

Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull: $185.5 million

The Dark Knight: $185.5 million

Wall-E: $180.5 million

2007:

Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End: $317.4 million

Spider-Man 3: $272.9 million

The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials: $213.4 million

Rush Hour 3: $187.4 million

2006:

Superman Returns: $295.3 million

Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: $223.1 million

X-Men: The Last Stand: $209.3 million

Poseidon: $171.3 million

2005:

King Kong: $232.5 million

Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion The Witch & The Wardrobe: $197.6 million

Sahara: $176.8 million

Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire: $150 million (2005 dollars)

2004:

Spider-Man 2: $232.2 million

Troy: $199.9 million

Van Helsing: $182.8 million

The Polar Express: $186.6 million

Alexander: $175.4 million

2003:

Terminator 3: $238.4 million

The Matrix: Reloaded: $176.7 million

Master And Commander: $175.6 million

The Matrix: Revolutions: $175.6 million

2000:

The Perfect Storm: $175.6 million

1999:

Wild Wild West: $221 million

The World Is Not Enough: $173.3 million

The 13th Warrior: $206.8 million

Notes: All figures are in 2009 dollars, adjusted for inflation. These figures are just production budgets, and are based on the most accurate figures we could find. They don't include marketing budgets. And of course, many of the films which failed to break even at the U.S. box office did make a profit when you factor in international box office.

Conclusions:

There hasn't been a movie as expensive as Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End since 2007, so you could argue that, over all, movies are not getting more expensive. However, after a few years where there were four mega-budgeted movies per year, the last two years have each seen six movies with budgets over $170 million (in inflation-adjusted dollars.) And as we mentioned above, this year had the most movies costing $200 million or more of any year, with next year likely to see even more films over $200 million.

And the listing above doesn't reflect this fact, but we also found a steep rise in the number of movies costing around $150 million every year — this seems to be the safe point for a film that is expected to do well, but may not be a blockbuster. Films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Batman Begins, Star Trek and many others all have production budgets in the magic $150 million zone.

At the same time, Hollywood seems slightly better at picking winners lately. We haven't had a year where most of the hugely expensive movies failed to make back their budget at the U.S. box office since 2004, when two historical epics, The Polar Expressand Van Helsing all bombed. Or 2003, when one of two Matrix sequels underperformed, along with Terminator 3 and Master And Commander.

One thing jumps out at me: There were apparently no budget busting movies in 2000, 2001 or 2002. Apparently the first X-Men movie, which came out in 2000, had a budget of only about $75 million. And the Star Wars prequels, hideous though they were, were apparently on the cheap side, costing around $120 million each (in non-adjusted dollars.)

Why would this be? Well, look at the three big-budget movies from 1999. Notice anything the three of them have in common? Hmmm... Other mega-expensive bombs in the late 1990s include Speed 2: Cruise Control, Lethal Weapon 4 and, of course, Waterworld. The only mega-budget movies to make money in the latter half of the 1990s were Armageddon and Titanic.

Sources: Know Your Money, Forbes.com, Listphobia, The Numbers, IMDB, Box Office Mojo, Wikipedia, and other sources as cited.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars - The Complete First Season Box Set
The name says it all: the entire first run of George Lucas' CGI take on what happened between Attack of The Clones and Revenge of The Sith gets a four-disc box set, complete with seven "director's cut" episodes, 22 behind-the-scenes featurettes (One for each episode), and a 64 page booklet explaining it all. If only they'd stuck the movie in there too.

Nov 10
Monsters, Inc. (BluRay Edition)
Pixar's 2001 take on the commodification of imagination - That is what it's really about, right? - gets an enormous 4-disc edition with its Blu Ray release. Expect many special features.

Up
Talking of Pixar, the movie of the summer - Go on, you can admit it now - comes out with multiple editions. There's a single disc version, a double disc DVD with commentary, alternate ending featurette and digital copy of the movie, and a four-disc Blu Ray that includes DVD and digital copies of the movie and all manner of special features (More on the marriage between Carl and Ellie!) and Making Of documentaries.

Nov 17
Farscape: The Complete Series Box Set
Yes, that would be 25 discs collecting the entirety of Rockne S O'Bannon's space opera, along with original promos, documentaries, episode commentaries, and all the other special features you'd expect from something like this.

Star Trek
JJ Abrams' Past Is Prologue bravely faces the Home Theater Frontier in a variety of formats: Bare bones single disc DVD, double disc DVD with digital copy of the movie, behind the scenes documentaries and lots of deleted scenes (including Klingons, for those who wondered where they were in the movie), and three disc Blu Ray with all of the above, plus more docs, a BD-Live link to NASA, Enterprise simulator and outtakes.

December 1
Terminator Salvation
Will it be the Director's Cut or the version released in theaters? Will that depend upon which version you pick up, DVD or Blu Ray? Will it actually be a good movie this time around? So much is still unknown about the home version of this summer's McG-director actioneer, but it's definitely coming out December 1st.

December 8
Family Guy: Something Something Dark Side
It's The Empire Strikes Back done-Family Guy style, which still freaks me out a little bit. Between this and the Robot Chicken episodes based on Star Wars, I wonder if George Lucas ever wonders whether he should be making even more royalties than he actually is?

Lost: The Complete 5th Season
A month before the show returns for its final season, I... Uh, I mean, you can start catching up and obsessively rewatching last season for clues as to where it's all going, and what Jacob was really up to all this time. A month should be long enough, right? Right?

Like the movie preview, we've split this preview into months (and, inside those months, into weekly releases), but with releases still unconfirmed and unannounced, we've pushed November and December together. Don't worry; it'll make sense when you click on the links below.

September
October
November/December

We know, we know: the Hollywood development cycle is a slow, lumbering beast. It can take anywhere from a couple years (for a "fast-track" project) to a decade for a movie to see the light of day. But given how many people were saying, this time last year, that The Dark Knight had changed everything, you'd expect there to be at least some films in development, if not in pre-production or actually filming.

And there don't seem to be any movies in "the pipeline" that seem consciously influenced by TDK. Here are a few possible contenders:

• Super-Max. Written by TDK co-writer David S. Goyer, this film has obvious elements in common with Knight. From the scraps we've gleaned, it's about the snotty trust-fund superhero Green Arrow, who gets sent to prison, probably for a crime he didn't commit. And he has to escape from the world's toughest, most advanced prison by teaming up with a host of DC Comics supervillains. Gritty dark action? Check. Moral ambiguity? Check. Heroes who cross the line? Pretty much. Too bad that every time we hear about this film, it sounds more and more like it's stuck in limbo.

• 

• Superman Returns (Again). Every time someone mentions doing another Superman movie in the wake of 2006's underwhelming Superman Returns, they say it'll feature a "dark" take on the Last Son Of Krypton, influenced by Christopher Nolan's take on Batman. Says Warner Bros. president Jeff Robinov, "We're going to go dark, to the extent that the character will allow." More recently, rumored Super-director James McTeigue said something similar. But this "darker" Man Of Steel movie is still stuck in limbo, and Warner Bros. execs told a courtroom that they don't see much box-office potential in another Superman movie. (Granted, they were trying to get out of having to pay Superman's creators' heirs tons of money for Hollywood rights.) In fact, when they talk about doing a "darker" Superman movie, it's usually said with an air of "Well, nobody really wants to make a Superman movie, but if you put a gun to our heads, we'd do a darker one." The confusing copyright situation with Superman means they have to start development on a new Superman film in the next few years, but assuming Warners gets more enthusiasm for the cinematic Man Of Steel again, they'll probably rediscover their love for his fun, escapist side.
• 
  
  
• The Fantastic Four. News sites started claiming last spring that Fox was considering rebooting this super-family series as a darker, "less bubble-gum" version. And now, just the other day, Fox announced it was definitely rebooting the Fantastic Four. On the other hand, they tapped the decidedly non-dark Akiva Goldsman (Batman And Robin, I Am Legend) to produce the new movie, and
  Michael Greene, writer for Smallville, Heroes and the upcoming Green Lantern movie, will write the script. I am having a hard time imagining that team creating a "dark" FF movie. Plus everyone assumes Fox's sudden interest in moving forward with Reed Richards & Co. was motivated by Disney's purchase of Marvel, and the fact that Disney reportedly wants to take back all of the Marvel properties' movie rights as soon as outside deals expire. If Fox wants to impress Disney, a misguided "dark" Fantastic Four doesn't seem a likely approach.
• 
  
  
  
• Shazam. It's hard to believe, but yes, they were talking about a dark Shazam movie in the wake of The Dark Knight. This is the story of a little boy who discovers a magic cave full of statues of the Deadly Sins, plus an old wizard who teaches him a magic world that will transform him into a big galoot whose nickname is The Big Red Cheese. And then he fights an evil mad-science worm with the help of a talking tiger. Actually, screenwriter John August and director Peter Segal wanted to do a fun, upbeat take on Shazam, but Warner Bros. wanted something more like The Dark Knight. So August rewrote his fun script to make it darker:

  This wasn't "Big, with super powers" anymore. It was Black Adam versus Captain Marvel, with a considerable push into dark territory and liminal badlands like Nanda Parbat. It wasn't the action-comedy I'd signed on to write, but it was a movie I could envision getting made.

  But then Warners pulled the plug on the Shazam movie altogether — remember how I said the enthusiasm for "dark" stories often seems to coincide with a lack of enthusiasm for making the movies at all? And now Shazam is back on track, with Bill Birch writing and comics scribe Geoff Johns pitching in. Says Variety, "The studio is now looking to go back to the original DC Comics source material for inspiration." Going back to the original comics source material is slang for "not fucking it up with a dark reimagining."

So what happened? There are a few theories.

Watchmen happened. You could argue that The Dark Knight changed everything, and then Watchmen changed it all back. Zack Snyder's movie version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic graphic novel was everything the studios were saying they wanted: dark, controversial, morally gray, challenging — and it didn't resonate that well with audiences. It had a so-so opening weekend, followed by a steep drop-off. (Sample headline from the L.A. Times: "Watchmen is going largely unwatched.")

Another "dark" movie that came out this summer, Terminator Salvation, did similarly badly. (It wasn't strictly a superhero film, but it had superhero-ish themes, and starred Bruce Wayne himself, Christian Bale.) And while Frank Miller's The Spirit was more goofy than dark, it did have a noir-ish look to it and was the handiwork of the original "Dark Knight" reinventer.

Meanwhile, movies like G.I. Joe and Wolverine, which were fluffy and bubbly and only challenged you to avoid giggling at their ridiculous dialogue and acting, did great. Audiences didn't suddenly stop liking braindead fun just because they liked one smart, bleak movie.

Also, the economy happened. Suddenly, people were hurting and depressed, and there were a spate of news stories saying that people in an economic shitstorm want upbeat, happy films. They want escapism and a pick-me-up, not a dreadful reminder that life is full of no-win situations and suffering. Whether that theory is true or not, it's one that seems to have a lot of currency in Hollywood.

And finally, looking back through those articles where execs are saying "I want a dark Shazam! I want a dark Dazzler! America needs a dark Howard The Duck!", I can't help noticing that this is usually accompanied by a lack of enthusiasm for whatever superheroic properties they're discussing. Sure, superheroes are big right now, but not every superhero movie is a huge hit, and characters like Superman and the Fantastic Four have fallen squarely into the second or third tier of big-screen spandex-flexers in the past decade or so.

Execs cast about for ways to make those lame fillies run again, and the "dark" thing is one of the ideas they hit on. But at this point, nobody seems to think "dark" is a cure-all for tired superheroes. At least, let's hope not.

UGO noticed that a recent email from the MPAA listed the DVD release of the movie as being rated R, with a note that "content is different from PG-13 version" (The R rating comes because of "some violence and brief nudity," apparently). McG had claimed the only stuff that got cut to make the movie PG-13 were a glimpse of Moon Bloodgood's breasts, and one brief moment of violence.

Whether or not this Director's Cut version will be make the movie any better is, of course, unknown at this time. But since the theatrical release seemed weirdly edited — as if some important scenes were either cut altogether or trimmed severely — it seems at least plausible that a longer DVD version might make a bit more sense. Here's hoping, anyway.

Terminator Salvation Was Rated R After All [UGO]

You've probably already heard about the lawsuit and the bankruptcy filing — but we've read the legal filings, and we have some more info about the tangled web below. The most important question for movie-lovers, however, is: Does this mean Terminator 5 (and 6) are doomed? Will the legal battles and money disputes keep the movie rights tied up indefinitely?

People familiar with the lawsuits tell io9 that Terminator 5 will definitely still happen — although different sources disagree about how long it'll take. But sources seem to agree that Terminator Salvation made too much money ($371 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo) for anyone to stand in the way of a fifth outing.

"Terminator 4 was a big hit, and everybody who was connected with that movie was pretty happy with it, and the're looking forward to a Terminator 5 and a Terminator 6 down the road," says a source familiar with Halcyon. All that needs to happen is for Halcyon to get rid of some liens that its financing company put on its assets (see below) and the company will move forward. (The holding company only filed for Chapter 11, or restructuring, bankruptcy.) Even though Terminator Salvation was more expensive than anticipated — something Halcyon blames on Pacificor — it still made a healthy profit.

Another source familiar with the case agrees, but says that the courts may have to get involved in the question of who owns the Terminator movie rights, and that may take some time. At the end of the day, someone will emerge holding those rights, and that someone will be highly motivated to put together another installment — but it may or may not be Halcyon co-founders Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson.

So how did we reach this apocalyptic legal scenario?

The Terminator movie rights are at the center of a massive power struggle between the producers of Terminator 4 and their financial backers, and the allegations are already flying like a squad of Hunter-Killers. We read the filings that Halcyon Co. put forth in their lawsuit against their financing company (Pacificor) and one exec in particular, Kurt Benjamin, and it reads like a thriller, with deception, double-crosses, deadly plane crashes and ticking clocks.

In a nutshell, Halcyon got wind of an opportunity to buy the Terminator franchise in 2006, but to do this they needed to raise cash in a hurry. Halcyon co-founders Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson met up with Kurt Benjamin, who helped raise money from Pacificor. But in their lawsuit, Halcyon claims that Benjamin never revealed that he was an employee of Pacificor. So Halcyon allegedly gave inside information to Benjamin — including the fact that they were desperate to raise money in time to buy the Terminator rights — and then Benjamin turned around and gave that info to Pacificor. That inside info allegedly allowed Pacificor to strong-arm Halcyon into agreeing to tougher loan terms.

Later, Benjamin allegedly used his inside info about Halcyon to extort a salary out of the company, driving it deeper into debt and forcing it to seek a second loan from Pacificor at tougher terms. After Pacificor's founder died in a plane crash, Halcyon allegedly became even more dependent on Benjamin to negotiate continuing finance from Pacificor, because Benjamin claimed nobody else at Pacificor even knew about the Terminator deal. Halcyon claims it was left with no choice but to pay up Benjamin's alleged "blackmail," which added to its debt load — at one point, Halcyon claims that it worried it would run out of money a scant few months before T4 was due to come out.

The upshot of all this is that Halcyon is apparently deeper in debt to Pacificor than the Terminator producers had bargained on. And according to their legal filings, Pacificor put a lien on all their assets "in a deliberate and desperate attempt to seize control and ownership of the Halcyon entities and the [Terminator] franchise," and to keep Halcyon from paying off its creditors. "As a result of the Lien, Halcyon has been unable to obtain financing that would enable [it] to meet its obligations, which could potentially result in Halcyon's loss of the [Terminator] Franchise."

A spokesperson for Halcyon declined to comment on pending litigation.

But Benjamin, the main defendant in one of Halcyon's two legal actions, tells io9 "everything that's alleged in their lawsuit, every allegation, is a lie." He adds: "This is just salacious creative writing, and I highly recomend that they and their lawyers work more on writing science fiction."

Both the Halcyon co-founders and their attorney knew all along that Benjamin worked for Pacificor, he claims. And far from acting as a go-between in the lending negotiations between Pacificor and Halcyon, Benjamin says he had no part in the discussions once he introduced the two parties. And after Pacificor's founder was killed in that plane crash, Anderson and Kubicek "coerced me to work with them," says Benjamin. Benjamin claims he wasn't even drawing a salary from Pacificor — he was just paid on commission for any deals he set up, which means his first paycheck didn't even materialize until January 2008.

And the reason why Terminator Salvation wound up costing more than expected, according to Benjamin? Producers Anderson and Kubicek wasted the money on personal expenses. "They're known in most Hollywood circles as the glitter twins," claims Benjamin. "The minute these guys got the funding, they went on wild spending sprees."

Nikki Finke broke the news that T Asset Acquisition, LLC, "and related entities that own the rights to the Terminator movie franchise" filed for Chapter 11 on Monday afternoon in Los Angeles, announcing that

[t]he companies will seek to restructure their financial obligations and resolve related litigation and other matters and emerge from Chapter 11 later this year or early in 2010.

According to the New York Times, T Asset Acquisition is a subsidiary of Halcyon, so it's no stretch to assume that the "related litigation" refers to the lawsuits against Pacificor and former Pacificor employee Kurt Benjamin.

Up for grabs in the current legal warfare are the rights to the Terminator franchise, which Halcyon could lose to Pacificor due to bad debt. Considering that it's less than six months ago that Halcyon owners Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek were being accused of stealing the rights themselves (the suit was settled out of court in April), there's some kind of irony at play here...

'Terminator' Owners File For Chapter 11 [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

It was a huge surprise when Halcyon Co., a small production company whose main other claim to fame is having first right of refusal on the film rights of all Philip K. Dick novels, successfully won the rights to the Terminator movie franchise, and actually got a Terminator movie made. Now Halcyon is suing the finance company that helped it achieve that feat, Pacificor, plus one of the company's employees, Kurt Benjamin. (Benjamin is accused of various types of fraud, including disguising the fact that he worked for Pacificor when he arranged the deal between Halcyon and Pacificor in the first place.)

Reading the details of the lawsuit, you encounter a certain level of paranoia that Halcyon won't be able to raise any more money for another Terminator film — or that Halcyon will lose control over the Terminator franchise altogether, or possibly come under the direct ownership of Pacificor. Halcyon co-founders Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek accuse Pacificor of tricking Halcyon into spending its own money on a Terminator Salvation video game, thus bringing Halcyon close to financial ruin. Benjamin is accused of forcing Halcyon to deal exclusively with Pacificor, preventing Halcyon from seeking financing elsewhere. And the suit also claims that Pacificor's execs, plus Terminator producer Moritz Borman, deliberately pushed Salvation over budget so that Halcyon would default, and Pacificor could grab the rights to the Terminator franchise away from Halcyon.

Like I said, reading between the lines, it doesn't sound like a suit filed by a company that's confident of being able to make another installment in the series in the near future. The bottom line appears to be that Halcyon currently owes more money to Pacificor than it can possibly pay back, and may end up having to hand over the Terminator rights as part of a settlement. How this would affect McG's plans to make a time-traveling fifth movie is anybody's guess. It's possible Pacificor (and Borman, if he's on board) would be thrilled to have a second McG outing.

Halcyon didn't return our calls seeking comment.

[L.A. Times and The Wrap]

Nature Abhors A Superhero Vacuum (But Apparently Abhors Wolverine Even More)
After last year's crunch of The Dark Knight, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk and Hancock (and you could arguably throw in Speed Racer in there, as well), this summer was remarkably clear of superheroes, if you ignore X-Men Origins: Wolverine (as most who've seen X-Men Origins: Wolverine are probably prone to do). But, even as Hollywood collectively recovered from last year's superpowered orgy and looked around the nostalgiascape to see if there were alternatives, we couldn't help but notice that some of the movies this summer seemed like superhero movies anyway. GI Joe, with your battlesuits and superhero team dynamic, we're looking at you.

It didn't hurt that Joe, like Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen and Star Trek, had clearly defined good guys and bad guys, as well as larger than life stakes and days to be saved - oh, and action set pieces during which the day-saving takes place. Yes, none of these films featured people with actual superpowers (aside from Spock's mind-melding, but come on), but in almost every other respect, they were superhero movies... and all the more successful for it.

Moral Ambiguity Isn't What We're Looking For, After All?
And what of Wolverine? Or pre-summer release Watchmen, for that matter...? Why weren't they Dark Knight-style colossuses (colossi?), striding across the box office landscape? Possibly for the same reason that Terminator Salvation disappointed: Because they were ill-considered, non-sensical pieces of filmmaking that considered style more important than substa - No, wait, I mean, "because neither offered any comfort to the viewer" (Okay, maybe a little of the former, too). Yes, Wolverine "won" at the end of his movie, but it was a shitty victory that still made him look like an easy dupe who'd been used and abused by The Powers That Be. Watchmen's (and, for that matter, Terminator Salvation's) victory was even more ambiguous. And maybe, Dark Knight aside - and who's to say that that movie won't continue to seem more and more like a fluke in terms of hyper-popularity as time goes on - that's just not what audiences are looking for from their blockbusters?

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Reviews
GI Joe wasn't screened for mainstream critics ahead of its release - which, considering the harshness of some of the reviews, seems like a sensible plan - and had a more successful opening than most expected. In interviews, Joe director Stephen Sommers cited the success of the badly-reviewed Transformers 2 as the reason why some movies don't need reviews any more:

I don't think the mainstream critics are relevant here, they have criticized themselves into irrelevancy. `Transformers 2' got the worst reviews in the last decade, and it is the biggest hit of the year. More people will see that than any other movie. On my movie, it became so clear to us. Why not make those reviewers pay their $15 like everyone else?

There is no way that the people behind other blockbuster movies - especially the ones that know that they're unlikely to get good reviews - aren't going to look at this and consider doing the same thing. It's not that critics have "criticized themselves into irrelevancy," but that studios are finally realizing that mass audiences have never, really, cared that much about them.

(Re)Birth Of The Alternative Mainstream
That said, what are we to make of critical darlings District 9, Cold Souls and Moon? Clearly, the great reviews mattered here - although, in D9's case, possibly not as much as Peter Jackson's name and an advertising campaign that's been going on for more than a year - drawing attention to smaller films that may otherwise have slipped through the cracks. Some are using these movies as a case for SF cinema "rediscover[ing] its brains, heart and soul," and there's definitely an argument to be made there... but there's an equally strong one to be made, I think, for these movies to be used as evidence for the need for SF cinema to be used as a vehicle for new voices wanting to exercise their imaginations and engage audiences before they get ground down by industry politics and pretention. It's not that big a step from Being John Malkovich to the rest of Charlie Kaufman or Spike Jonze's movie careers, after all.

By the end of this summer movie season, it feels as if cinema has fragmented: There are the critic-proof (and unnecessarily-reviewed) blockbusters that fit into our nostalgic take on what stories should be, with good guys and bad guys and evil losing in the end, there are the intellectual, playful, indie darlings, and then there're movies that try and straddle the two and fail at the box office (Although, as ever, "failure" is a moving target; Watchmen must have easily made its money back by now, and if not, will do so with the "Ultimate Edition" DVD at the end of the year). Maybe next year, Jon Favreau's Iron Man 2 will shake things up a little. Here's hoping.

Talking to IESB, the director said,

Obviously, Michael Bay had tremendous success following Transformers, in a very short window. Sometimes people like to take time off, but I'm excited about the next installation of the story, in the Terminator idea. So, for me, it's terribly exciting to get back out there and show a different face of that idea, and perhaps get out of the apocalyptic world and into a contemporary world. I think the audience is going to be very excited about our way in.

Is that a hint that the next movie will abandon Salvation's "No time travel! All apocalypse all the time!" hook for a return to the traditional set-up of the first three movies?

Meanwhile, McG's also busily listening to critics of the last movie and setting up straw-man arguments to respond to:

I listen to everything. It's interesting because a lot of people don't like me, but a lot of people just don't like my name. I can't take that too seriously because that's been my name my whole life. It's not something that I prescribed myself.

Really? Your parents really called you "McG"? You didn't come up with that one yourself?

McG Tells IESB He's Currently Prepping Terminator 5 and Says He's Taken his Lumps in Stride [IESB]

The new movie is expected to make above $50 million between Friday and Sunday, according to analysts, which would make it more successful than Terminator Salvation and within Watchmen's $55.7 million opening weekend (Joe actually grossed more than Watchmen on the Friday, but Watchmen's Thursday night screenings took it to $25.1 million total for the day officially). This may be the sign that movie executives were looking for, in terms of proof that name recognition and a more general rating - Joe is a PG-13, against Terminator and Watchmen's R ratings - is more important than either positive buzz or the quality of the finished movie.

With mainstream reviews coming in and not being very good (although Roger Ebert's is a masterpiece of snark), it'll be interesting to see if that impacts attendance throughout the weekend. If it doesn't, and Joe ends up making somewhere around the rumored $55 million, expect to see more toy movies being rushed into production... and past the movie critics.

2009 has been a hard year for fans, let's face it. Two high-profile movies had successfully wooed them with trailers, internet teasers and big promises from press junkets, and then failed to deliver when they finally appeared. To add insult to injury, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was dealt a death blow after finally convincing doubters that it had a reason to exist that didn't rhyme with Bummer Blau. Even the renewal of Dollhouse couldn't stop the pain (And, for some, just made it worse in a "Why this and not that? Why is the universe so random, oh God, why?!?" way, to be honest), and even a summer full of Star Trek and Transformers was overshadowed by the potential hall of suck that GI Joe is rumored to be (Although it may surprise us all, and the anti-hate backlash has begun, bizarrely and happily enough). In all the rush to talk about the technical successes of Avatar, one thing seems to be being overlooked: We need this movie to be a success as much as anyone else does. The alternative will be too heartbreaking.

In a way, Avatar itself is almost secondary to the whole thing. I mean, yes; we want to see it and we're excited about seeing it and the footage that's been screened is what we're all talking about and getting excited by, but it's like Watchmen and Terminator Salvation; we're buying into the hype and the promise that this won't just be a good movie, but one that will change our lives in some way. There's every potential that the movie can be good, even amazing, and still seem like a disappointment (It'll be interesting to see what Watchmen will seem like, years later, when it can finally be viewed away from the hyperbole that surrounded it). It's not enough for Avatar to be a good movie anymore; it has to be the best movie starring Sam Worthington about alien warfare in space that we've ever seen.

Where did this pressure come from? Why do some films become avatars (heh) of the hopes and dreams of collective nerddom, and suffer from those raised expectations when the movie is finally ready to be seen by the world? Some movies actively seek to become the nerd grail - Hi, Tron Legacy! - in a way of building enough buzz to try and cross over into the mainstream through noise and net presence as much as anything else (Call it The Dark Knight effect, I guess), but it seems to me that, just like Amy Winehouse's love, it's a losing game: By baiting fans continually with teases and hints and promises that they've never seen anything like this before, they're actively creating a million fictional movies in a million different heads that will be more exciting and personal than the real thing could ever be. The only way to win by doing that is by doing something that isn't what fans expect; getting back to Dark Knight for a second, the structure of the movie and the machismo nihilism - while both were frustrating - came out of left field, and in surprising the audience, deflated whatever expectations they may have gone in with. Watchmen didn't have the luxury to try that, and Terminator Salvation... well, we don't like to talk about that anymore.

Getting back to my point, though; Avatar could still win. So much of the movie is still shrouded in secrecy, and it's that element that allows Cameron and his crew the opportunity to deliver something that we really won't be expecting. What people have seen so far shows that one of the concerns everyone had - that the visual effects would disappoint - isn't really a problem anymore, but even though finding that out raises the stakes slightly (Now we get the "They conquered the effects! What could go wrong now?!?" euphoria, for one thing), we still don't really know enough about the movie itself to come up with a version in our heads that we could fully expect to see.

I hope that they manage it, and that the finished movie lives up to all of their promises and hype; the last thing we need to finish the year is another example of our selfish dreams gone sour.

Here are five pieces of wisdom that we've gleaned from the last six months (and handful of days):

President Obama Is The Greatest Hero Of All
As his many comic book appearances have demonstrated, there's no end to our current president's ability to save the world from any genre of threat. Amazing Spider-Man has him fighting supervillains, Youngblood shows him carrying massive laserguns to shoot renegade soldiers taking over the White House, Drafted gives us an alien-invasion-battlin' Barack and Barack The Barbarian brings everything back down to sword and sorcery basics. He's like a modern-day Arnold Schwarzenegger - and enough to make us wonder just how the comic industry would've dealt with John McCain winning the election instead.

Threats To Humanity Are Getting Weaker
Last year, it was the Large Hadron Collider and the possibility that it would rip existence apart when someone flipped the switch, and this year, it was... Swine Flu. It can't just be me, can it? I mean, Swine Flu... Doesn't that seem like a step down from the technological "Our Quest For Knowledge May Destroy Us All" conceptual genius that threatened us last year? Even calling it "the H1N1 Influenza Virus" still sounds kind of shit. Okay, so there's no chance of "hardon" spoonerisms, but still: Pandemics? Haven't we done that already? I'm holding out hope that sewer monsters will brighten the remaining months of the year, however.

The BBC Should Stop Making Us Feel Old
Yes, we know that it's just one of those aimless homilies that you know that you're getting old when the policemen and doctors start looking younger, but selecting a twelve year old to be the new Doctor Who really doesn't make us feel very good about ourselves nonetheless. I know that we started with the oldest of the Doctors and have progressively gotten younger since then - well, roughly - but between David Tennant and Matt Smith, I'm convinced that we'll have our first pre-teen Timelord by 2015. And then, the next one will be a little baby, just like in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Joss Whedon Can Defy The Laws Of Nature
If nothing else, the renewal of Dollhouse proves that he can defy the laws of television. I wouldn't put money on him being unable to fly if he really wanted to.

Fuck Dystopia
Terminator Salvation and Watchmen - two downbeat movies offering popcorn versions of pessimistic views of humanity ("Ultimately, man's greed and laziness will lead us to become disconnected from our fellow man and controlled by the machines and mechanisms that we created to ease our daily existences - but doesn't this slow-motion action sequence look hot?") - both failed to meet expectation at the box office, while Star Trek's hopeful, colorful version of a future that may be too lens-flarey to be cuddly but is nonetheless positive surpassed expectations. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles also died a slow death on television. The obvious conclusion? No-one wants to their entertainment to end with the lesson "We're all screwed." The Dark Knight's glossy hopelessness was so last year, people. We hadn't experienced so much of the economic downturn and/or the hopetrain of Obama back then. We were all so much more innocent and desperate to be mistreated by our movies. (Along the same lines - Size Matters: Terminator, featuring human-sized robots, fails to become a hit. Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, featuring giant robots, breaks box office records. I think you can see what I'm saying here. See also: Robot On Robot Action Is More Acceptable Than Robot On Batman Action and Megan Fox Is Hotter Than Moon Bloodgood. Sorry, But There It Is.)

Bolstered with this new knowledge, we look forward to what the rest of the year can teach us - presuming, of course, that the sewer monsters don't decide to team up with Joss Whedon and end the world before then. Pray for us.

Titan Books, which published the book version of Terminator Salvation, kindly sent out a half dozen copies to some of io9's writers as well as some of our most prolific commenters and occasional posters. So how did the story of Marcus Wright's cyborg angst and John Connor's struggle with tourettes translate into book form? Here's what they thought.

The participants:

Annalee Newitz, io9 editor

Chris Hsiang aka Grey Area, frequent commenter and regular book reviewer.

Hank Hu aka CrashedPC, regular commenter.

Josh Wimmer aka Moff, regular commenter and "Jive Tarkin" columnist

Alexis Brown aka EvlSushi, regular commenter, current intern and regular poster.

Charlie Jane Anders, io9 news editor and occasional leaver of the house.

So in order to maximize the value to you, the readers, we'll try and divide this review up into a few sections.

Does the novel make sense?

It definitely makes more sense than the movie, is the consensus. Maybe because Foster was working from a script that included a lot of scenes that were cut, or trimmed, for the final movie, there's a lot more explanation of what the heck is going on.

As in the movie, it's 2018, and the self-aware computer system Skynet has all but wiped out the human race. John Connor leads the last remnants of humanity in the fight against the machines, while struggling to save his own father, Kyle Reese. And meanwhile, a man named Marcus Wright wakes up years after being executed, and begins to suspect that he may no longer be human.

Says Hank, "The novel, even while reading like a grade-school primer for action movies, had a modicrum of sense. Being able to read someone's internal thought process is extremely satisfying. Connor is not a shouty loud madman like what I've heard about the movie, but he's just too damn emo at times."

The novel includes a lot more conversations between John Connor and his wife, Kate, about how the timeline may have changed. Connor has actual smart discussions about the supposed "off switch" and whether it's likely that Skynet would really have left such an easy backdoor in its systems. And the Connors talk a lot more about Kate's pregnancy and John's doubts about his ability to save people in this new altered timeline.

As Chris points out, Foster spends a lot of time explaining how Skynet's stronghold in San Francisco is so poorly guarded. "Foster tried to fill in as many plot holes as he could. His explanations for why there was very little security in San Francisco and why the HKs didn't bother Connor's base almost work."

And after the Connors encounter Marcus, there's a much more in-depth discussion of exactly who he might be, and what he represents. At one point, Kate explains exactly how that cyborg infrastructure works, and how it's all wired. This is a huge improvement over the movie, where they just sort of look at Marcus and grunt.

And yet, there are still some plot holes.

Grey Area observes:

The batshit insane sequence where Connor hacks a moto-terminator and rides it to San Francisco across the ruined Golden Gate Bridge was kinda cool but totally batshit insane. That wasn't actually in the movie was it?

Hank wonders:

I still don't understand why Marcus is like, the most advanced 'bot of them all. From what I can tell, he donated his body to science after being punished, capitally. If his brain is still the original organic one, why is he the most advanced one? Shouldn't he be like the beta stage prototype garbage bot that can barely formulate sentences. Instead he's the Incredible Hulk that can formulate complex sentences, albeit broody ones.

Adds Alexis:

And why is John Connor so flippin' special anyway? We have yet to see him do much of anything to justify how important he is to the timeline. The machines seeme to have ultimate control of everything, right? And humans are scattered and living like rats. So, how is this a war and not a complete massacre?

Josh zeroes in on the ultimate plot hole:

And why is saving Kyle Reese so important? So that John Connor can send him back in time so that he gets born? Is he going to disappear Back to the Future–style if Kyle dies? Because I wasn't feeling the impending doom.

At the end of the book, there's no heart transplant. Instead, the characters just escape intact. (You can read the adaptation of the movie's actual ending on the Titan books website.) And then Foster throws in a weird hint that Star, the cute little orphan with the funny hat — may actually be a Terminator. Her eye glints redly... or is it just a trick of the light? We may never know.

How about the characters? Are they more fleshed out?

Definitely. Marcus Wright, in particular, benefits from the novel's ability to flesh out his inner life and give him a stronger story arc. As Alexis points out, the early scene where Marcus meets Serena Kogan and agrees to donate his body to her experiments is much stronger. The kiss between the two of them is described lovingly, although it's made clear it's not a loving kiss — it's a last act of violence from a violent man. And we get an running monologue summarizing Marcus' thoughts and his final struggles as the lethal injection wipes him out. His last thought is about the kiss with Serena, and how he could have done it better. As Alexis says, it's nice stuff.

Grey Area liked the way the novel reveals

the humanity of Marcus, and the whole deterministic fate thingy. A vicious thug becomes more human and sympathetic after becoming cyborged. It's as if Skynet, that notorious softie with its keen insight into human emotion, re-programs Marcus with a better soul. Neat idea, but as I stated before I cannot buy that the cold emotionless Skynet is occasionally Dr. Phil.

Adds Hank,

Honestly, I thought Marcus Wright was pretty cool. Never mind the fact that he knew himself that he was executed and now he's walking around, shrugging off attacks and saving children. He was much more of a sympathetic character than most of the Resistance. Or even surviving nomads. Perhaps he was meant to be the real star of the show?

Even more, Grey Area approves of the way the novel gives us

Connor's realization that he is as programmed as the machines he fights.He's been told since birth that he will become this great leader. He really has no choice and doesn't even seem to have any actual leadership qualities. Hell, his people follow him just because they've been told to.

Hank notes:

One part I did like in particular: Marcus escaping the silo. The Resistance fighters just acted so dense, so naively, that I felt no sympathy for them. It does them no favors when Marcus was described so heroically and positively prior, and then now Barnes is taking potshots at him when he's strung up. I know they hate the machines and all, but jeez, it's like they didn't even bother trying to figure out how such a perfect melding of human and machine came about. "IT'S A TRAP" is essentially all they kept shrieking.

On the minus side, everybody hates Star the cute orphan, in the book as much as in the movie. And one character who gets fleshed out to ill effect is Virginia, the white-haired lady who takes Star under her wing in the movie. In the book, we learn way more about Virginia than we ever wanted, as she tells Star bedtime stories and sings lullabies to her.

How tongue-in-cheek is it?

The novel features some of the purplest, silliest prose Alan Dean Foster has ever committed to paper. You can't help but wonder if Foster, who's a great writer when he wants to be, wasn't mocking the whole story, or at least trying to lighten up the intentionally humorless film.

Grey Area picks out the following choice lines:

pg. 16 "Wright rose from the cot. Standing, he looked a lot taller, a lot bigger."

pg 35 " 'Jericho, come in!', Olsen's fingers tightened on his communicator.
Jericho didn't come in. The communicator's locked frequency was as silent as the grave. A bad simile, the general thought, especially considering his present subterranean location."

pg. 139 "She did not really know him yet, and she did not want him to see the unbridled gratitude that she knew must be suffusing her face."

And, from the very ending:

"How long?"
She tried to shrug but was unable to lift her shoulder.
"Any moment. His heart can't take it." Her eyes met the sergeant's, and she continued. "The Terminators have beat him up and history has worn him down."
Barnes tried to think of something to say. Of the right thing to say.
"It's going to be okay."

Hank's favorite line:

This resulted in even more bits and pieces flying off of the machine. This resulted in a termination of the pursuit.

Annalee picks out a few choice lines as well:

* * * When Dr. Serena Kogan (later to be the Face Of Skynet) first meets Marcus before he's killed, and turns into Bill Cosby:

"How are you?" she finally murmured.

In the troglodytic confines of the cell the query was at least as funny as the paramount punchline of a highly paid stand-up comedian.

* * * When Williams fights off would-be rapists, right before Marcus steps in to help:

That was just enough time for Williams to dart forward and slam the knucles of her closed fist into his throat . . . He dropped like the sack of shit he was.

* * * After Marcus escapes from the resistance camp, John Connor shows off his powers of perception:

He had barely made back into the woods when shapes rose sharply from bush to confront him and he found himself staring down the barrels of three rifles.

"Halt and identify yourself!" the noncom in charge barked.

"John Connor." What a pity, he mused halfheartedly, that he could not be someone else.

But he knew he was John Connor.

* * Marcus hooks up with Skynet in the machine complex - and we do mean "hooks up."

Revealed to his probing gaze was an intricate maze of glowing wiring, silent chips, and busy processing units. He stared at the lambent display, memorizing all that he could.

Finally he gave up and shoved his hands deeply into the electronic wonderland.

The initial contact caused him to spasm . . .

After reading through all these quotes, I can't help but feel that Foster was trying to lighten the tone a bit. And maybe sending up the story, just a tad.

The bottom line:

The consensus seems to be: The novel is held back by having to be an adaptation of such a nonsensical movie, but it's clear Alan Dean Foster was having fun writing it. And as a result, it's a pretty fun read. And if you've been sitting around wrestling with all the dozens of things that didn't make sense in the movie — and wondering exactly what was going through these people's heads as they were running around from action sequence to mopey slow-mo — then this novel may be of great value to you.

Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Novelization [Amazon.com]

Variety reports that Terminator: Salvation is doing well outside of its home country, taking the international box office top spot - and $43.4 million - last weekend for an international total of $164.4 million:

"Terminator" scored $10.7 million in Japan, the biggest opening haul in that country since "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" last year. And it opened to $9 million in China, one of the top openings of all time for a non-Chinese film.

That may not seem like much when compared with Night At The Museum 2's international total of $175.9 million or Angels and Demons' $319 million, but compared with Trek's international take of $118.7 million (across a month more time in theaters), it's significant. So what can this be down to? Star Trek has traditionally fared poorly outside of the US, and that undoubtedly feeds into its international performance (It's made almost twice that in the US), but there's no denying it: Terminator Salvation is on its way to becoming a bona fide hit internationally, despite the drubbing and poor performance in the US. Maybe we should try selling The Sarah Connor Chronicles to overseas producers.

'Terminator' scores big in Asia [Variety]

How Will Robots See in 2018? [Fast Company]

The Guardian reports that Salvation made £6.94 million in its first weekend, topping Wolverine's previous 2009 record of £6.66 million. This despite both movies receiving equally bad reviews in the UK as they did in the US, so it's not as if they gained some extra credibility and/or quality on the trip across the Atlantic. So what's going on?

It's not as if the UK is so science fiction-starved that they'll go see anything; yes, Doctor Who is having a half-year off, but British audiences have just finished new seasons of Ashes To Ashes and Primeval and have Torchwood returning in little over a month. Perhaps, then, the subject matter of the movies have just captured the British imagination more readily than they have the American. While US audiences shied away from the American dystopia of Terminator and evil-military of Wolverine for reasons of events still in recent memory, British audiences have more distance on those concepts - and, perhaps, more eagerness to see America get trashed. Perhaps they see it as karmic payback for the international upset caused by the Bush administration.

(This idea - that non-American audiences may be more in tune with things going wrong for Americans in movies, because they're (a) not living in America, currently trying to continue the Obama-sque feelings of optimism, change and hope despite economic meltdown and coming to terms with what the War On Terror did to the country's moral certainty and (b) instead looking for some sense of international schadenfreude because of said War On Terror and resulting unintended political diplomacy mishaps - may even explain Terminator Salvation's international box office almost matching its entire US take in its first weekend.)

Alternatively, there's always the possibility that the drearier British summers may have had something to do with it; as the Guardian notes,

As with all films currently in the market, Terminator Salvation benefited from dismal weather.

Perhaps that's the next big thing that Hollywood should hope for in the American market, instead of giant robots and old school superheroes; more rain.

Maybe we're jumping to conclusions. After all, Star Trek shows that audiences clearly don't have a problem with every franchise makeover that offers itself to them on a CGI-laden, lens-flared platter.

But we couldn't help but notice that Masi Oka's new project about videogamers who end up saving the world after it turns out that the game is more than just a game is oddly reminiscent of 1984 movie The Last Starfighter (in which a video-gamer saves the universe after it turns out that the game is more than just a game) in the same way that Stephen Chow's cute alien movie is "reminiscent" of ET (Oh, wait; he admitted that that was a rip-off). While it's arguably true that there are no new stories anymore, the similarities between these "new" movies and the 1980s originals have gotten us wondering whether ripping off cult favorites is the way forward for Hollywood's nostalgia-struck executives.

Think about it: With all the sequels, remakes and adaptations of much-beloved comics and television shows that make up the summer blockbuster slate these days, it'd be too much to ask for some genuine originality from anyone other than the animators - and, worse, we could end up with something worse than G-Force if they tried - but remaking movies with the serial numbers filed off gives moviemakers the chance to indulge their desire to relive their childhoods without risking the wrath of fans of the same childhood shows, movies and comics they want to revisit. Sure, you lose the brand recognition, but that's a double-edged sword these days: Who's to say that Terminator Salvation wouldn't have been more successful if it hadn't had the weight of the first two movies on its celluloid shoulders?

I'm not suggesting that we wish for a world where everything is Transmorphers instead of Transformers, but I can't help but wonder whether Defenders and CJ7 point to a new middle ground that would allow everyone to keep their sacred cows idealized in memory yet relive them in new forms, unencumbered by expectation, preconception and nostalgia. Put it this way: You don't want to watch a new Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie without Joss Whedon, but would you be that against a new movie about a teenage girl fighting monsters if she had a different name?

Variety reports that Salvation's $67.5 million opening weekend across 70 territories is the third largest so far this year, behind Angels and Demons and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, potentially proving that international audiences have a really bad taste in movies. The movie was the the most popular release in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Russia and Australia, and is less than $10 million away from matching the movie's domestic total even before next weekend's release in Japan. With an international reception like that, suddenly those rumors about setting T5 in London make slightly more sense.

'Terminator' strong in overseas debut [Variety]

Claiming unnamed "industry sources," Bleeding Cool says that the sequel to Salvation will see resistance leader John Connor himself travel back in time to try and stop the robot takeover of the world - but that he'll be abandoning America to come back to 2011 London. Quite why London would be chosen as the new battleground - in plot or production senses - isn't immediately clear, but the site claim that Christian Bale will again play Connor in this potential return to form. We're skeptical, but willing to be convinced.

Terminator 5 Comes To London [Bleeding Cool]

So there you have it: Arnold's entire cameo, more or less. That's about how much time he spends on film. But, in the movie's defense, it is a beautiful bit of CG work.

Just think: Somewhere, McG is wondering if he can get Pink to do a cover of this for T5.

"I'll Be Back" Terminator Monster Ballad [YouTube]

Why do the studios decide that scenes are strong enough to make it into movie trailers, but not strong enough to show up in the finished product? It's a mystery, but it shows how much last-minute editing and tweaking goes into movies nowadays. We're not the only ones to notice this — when I was almost done writing this post, I came across this discussion over at Cinematical.

Here are some examples from giant films of the past decade or so:

Incredible Hulk:

Star and co-writer Edward Norton famously clashed with Marvel over how long this movie should be, and a couple of scenes were featured prominently in the trailers but didn't make it into the theatrical release. There's this fireside chat between Bruce Banner and "Doc" Samson:

And then there's the whole opening sequence where Banner goes to Antarctica to try and kill himself, which supposedly includes a glimpse of Captain America's frozen body:

And also, the same trailer includes a bit where Bruce Banner argues with General Ross, saying there's only one thing that can fight the Abomination and "it's in me."

Terminator Salvation:

There seems to be a lot of stuff that was cut from the final print of the movie, where John Connor obsesses about how the future has been altered by all the time traveling in previous installments. "This is not the future my other warned me about," he says in one trailer.

In another trailer, his wife Kate says, "If you saved us in another future, you can save us in this one," or words to that effect. I get the impression all of Kate's stuff got cut out of the final print of the movie. That scene is included in this four-minute trailer:

Also, I can't remember Connor actually saying, "Win or lose, this war ends tonight" in the actual movie. Did he say that, and I just missed it?

We're also pretty sure that Connor putting his hand on his wife's pregnant stomach wasn't in the movie. (In fact her pregnancy hardly comes up at all.)

And there's a glimpse of a naked figure (or at least barelegged) reaching down and grabbing a Terminator's arm gun to blast the hell out of someone or something. Could that have been a rejected sequence featuring Arnie's T-800? I bet they shot a lot of stuff with Roland Kickinger, the bodybuilder whose naked body stood in for Arnie's:

Star Trek:

We know they filmed a decent amount of stuff for this movie, including some more of Kirk's childhood and the reasons he decided to trash that Corvette. But the main thing that shows up in the trailers is the birth of baby Spock:

There's also a sequence where Nero says "The wait is over," which is in a bunch of the trailers but not in the movie. I think this is right after he busts out of the Klingon prison.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine:

Actually, this doesn't seem like it would have been such a great scene, but one trailer includes a sequence where we meet Storm as a kid:

Wanted:

A poster at Cinematical says the whole great scene where James McAvoy asks Angelina Jolie "Are we gonna bond now?" and she says, "Would you like to?" isn't in the movie. I don't have the movie on DVD, and can't remember off-hand if they're right:

Armageddon:

As a commenter at Cinematical pointed out, the trailer for this film includes a whole inspirational speech from Bruce Willis, which never turns up in the movie:

I Am Legend:

This IMAX trailer (and some of the other trailers, I think) include some snippets of the film's original ending, which was replaced at the last minute. It's the bit where the plague mutant hisses right next to Will Smith's face, at around 2:20 in this video:

2046:

Another one the Cinematical commenters noticed. Apparently this film's trailers include a ton of futuristic scenes that aren't in the movie, including Maggie Cheung as a robot:

Reign Of Fire:

Annalee has been annoyed for years that this movie's trailer featured dragons fighting helicopters, but it didn't really happen in the movie:

True Lies:

And finally, reaching back quite a bit further, here's a trailer for True Lies that includes a number of scenes that aren't in the movie, or even in the DVD:

I never expected to be saying this, but I'm actually sort of eager to see Transformers: Revenge OF the Fallen. I actually liked the first one, which was a fun, silly romp as long as you took it on its own terms. But I held fairly low expectations for TF2, whose script Michael Bay allegedly worked on during the writers' strike. It's like the first one, only sequel-ier. So I wasn't that pumped.

But the more I've seen of the summer's other movie offerings, the more they've felt like Michael Bay foreplay. (Bayplay?) I'm being teased by faux Bays.

The mark of the Bay-manqué is the explosion as mission statement: every movie I've seen lately, pretty much, has had like two or three really amazing action set-pieces, and then nothing else going on. Knowing? There was the plane crash and the train crash, and some stuff going boom towards the end, and the rest of the movie was just Nic Cage emoting with his forehead. Wolverine? There was the awesome African strongman-pwnage, the helicopter-motorcycle-truck dance, and some fun super-fighting towards the end, and the rest was all jaw-acting. Terminator had a couple of helicopter smashing bits, the truck-motorcycle-hunter-killer dance, and the rest was people shouting. And so on.

I was thinking to myself the other day, the thing these movies all had in common is that they had a few really killer action bits, which obviously consumed most of the director's attention, and probably most of the budget as well. And those bits get heavily featured in the trailers, so we'll think the whole movie is like that. And I was thinking, maybe in five years, the whole movie will be like that. They'll make CG effects cheap enough, or they'll be clever enough, to have the whole movie be just trucks and helicopters and motorcycles and maybe guitars smashing into each other and going BWATHOOM!. And then I thought, who would be able to make a movie like that? Pretty much only Michael Bay.

In Transformers 2, there will be crazy explosions. People will possibly be peed on. There will be sexy chicks, some of whom — spoiler alert — will turn out to be robots in disguise, with tentacles. (Including the one above.) Airplane carriers will be tossed like bath toys. What's not to love?

Just look at these ridiculous stills from the film, which positively scream Baynia:

But also, there's another factor at work. I've noticed something about our recent crop of movies: they divide into two categories, fun and ohmygodthepainwhy. In the first category, you have films like Star Trek, which may have the occasional serious moments but are basically just a fun ride with good guys defeating bad guys and exhibiting some smidgen of personal growth along the way. In the latter category, there are movies like Terminator 4 and (yes, I'll say it) Watchmen. Even Wolverine seemed to be trying too hard to be taken seriously.

This year, the fun movies have seemed better than the movies that have groped for gravitas in the dark. Maybe that's because I'm willing to give more of a free pass to movies that just want to be a fun ride, and I'm harsher on movies that demand to be viewed as something grander. Or maybe it's just because this year's crop of dark, serious films hasn't been that interesting? Last year, The Dark Knight was possibly the year's most fascinating movie, and Iron Man had some real darkness among the hijinks. But I haven't been feeling the weighty science fiction films of 2009 so far — maybe it's the recession, maybe it's the writers' strike, maybe it's just randomness.

Whatever the reason, I'm enjoying fun fluff more than weighty journeys into the darkness of the human soul lately. And I'm actually feeling a bit pumped for another helping of giant smashing robots with urinary incontinence. Including an ice-cream truck robot and a pink lady motorcycle robot (whom Bay kills off because hates lady robots, bah) and a bunch of robots representing new car models that you probably won't ever be able to buy because the auto industry is being eaten by Decepticons. And Shia LaBoeuf gets tortured, although probably not enough.

And of course, it's written by the Star Trek scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (plus Bram Stoker nominee Ehren Kruger, and whatever demented scribblings Bay did while Orci and Kurtzman were on strike.) I'm cutting Orci and Kurtzman a lot of slack right now.

Plus, Michael Bay blows up the pyramids! The actual pyramids, in Egypt! He's destroying our precious cultural heritage for our momentary amusement! How could there possibly be anything wrong with that?

But seriously, I'm actually kind of excited for Transformers 2, and every time I walk out of a movie that feels like an inferior Bay knockoff, I get a little bit more Transformed by excitement.

Look at who was President of the United States when the last Terminator movies were released (Or, for that matter, when Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles got launched on Fox). Notice a trend?
Apparently, Republican administrations mean good things for Terminators (Insert your own robotic overlord joke here)... Weirdly enough, the inverse can be shown for Star Trek, which got its start (and a couple of rebirths) under Democrats, as well as seeing its most popular period while Clinton was in power... before dying an awkward death under a Republican regime (As long as you ignore the fact that The Next Generation got its start while Ronald Reagan was president. I get around that by pointing out that the show wasn't any good until the third season, and then saying that it's the exception that proves the rule, before looking at the ground, embarrassed).

Coincidence, or something more sinister? You be the judge, but maybe there's a case to be made for the connection between audiences feeling more in tune with the end of the world when there's a right wing President in office, compared with the more utopian values a liberal president inspires in us. Causation or correlation? You be the judge.

(* - This may not be entirely true.)

Iron Man 2:

Another batch of set pics from this movie. This time, it's not a mysterious structure, it's director Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. filming at Edwards Air Force Base. (Somewhat unrevealing photos by U.S. Air Force). [Sci Fi Wire]

Terminator 5:

If there are more sequels, McG says we'll follow the continuity established in Terminator 3, which stated that a T-850 killed John Connor. (Although, having been told that a T-850 kills him, wouldn't Connor, you know, take steps to avoid that fate?) Also, McG says he storyboarded a scene where Marcus Wright takes his brother out stealing cars for the first time, and the police show up and the brother dies in the crossfire, along with some cops. The storyboards will probably be included on the DVD. [MTV]

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen:

Check out a new image of Optimus Prime waving a big robo-sword around. (Is he going to fence Sulu with that thing? One can only hope.) Full version of image at the link. [Collider]

And here are a few more images, including one group shot at the Boneyard. [ReelComix]

Eureka:

When this glad-science show returns July 10, we'll see more of Ever Carradine as Jack's sister, Lexie. And The 4400's Billy Campbell will appear as a specialist brought in to assist with a Global Dynamics project. [TV Guide]

Lost:

Damon Lindelof describes the show's finale somewhat cryptically:

We've been planning out the final season for four years now. And of all the talks we have had about the show, [reuniting all the castaways] is the subject that has come up the most. The ending was almost where we began, and we had to figure out how to get there. It's like a wedding where the reception is the part that requires the most planning and is the most fun to plan. We've exchanged our vows and I am ready to go party.

[EW]

Green Lantern: First Flight:

Writer Alan Burnett says he pitched this story as Training Day, with Sinestro as Denzel Washington.

The story is essentially Hal Jordan's first day on the beat as a cop and he's partnered with Sinestro. He's seeing the universe for the first time, and we get to look at the universe through his eyes. It's a bizarre place, but it's also pretty recognizable.

And here are a few new stills. [Warner Bros.]

Warehouse 13:

Eureka's Erica Cerra and Niall Matter will guest star as small-time thieves who make it big, thanks to a luck-inducing artifact. (They're going there already?) And Joe Morton guest stars as a religious leader locked up in a Florida prison. [EW]

Chuck:

The show may get more than 13 episodes in its third season after all — if the show does well in the ratings, it could extend out into next summer, running alongside Friday Night Lights. And Scott Bakula says he's game to return as Chuck's dad. [TV Guide]

Smallville:

Here's a new season nine casting notice, which may be for Zod:

MASON: Late 20's early 30's. He's a handsome charismatic charmer who savors life. He appreciates good food, loves fast cars and sees beauty in every woman. There isn't a detail in life that eludes his senses. He is a master of seduction... knowing what everyone wants and needs before they do. But don't let his magnetism fool you. There's more than meets the eye. His intelligence can't be matched. He outmaneuvers everyone in his path. Though he longs to find a home, that vulnerability can be twisted — making him a force to be reckoned with."

[EW]

True Blood:

The first casualty of season two is related to Tara, but not in a way that you'll be able to guess. And the significance of that death won't be apparent at first, but just wait. Also, one character's drinking problem resurfaces hilariously. [TV Guide]

In the season's first four episodes, there are no less than three orgies, powered by Maryann's aphrodisiac fairy dust. The Nordic vampire Eric gets into a very homoerotic encounter with either Jason or Eggs (Tara's new BFF), and both of those characters spend a lot of time shirtless. Sookie has a very revealing conversation with a new character in episode four. And Merlotte's newest waitress (Ashley Jones) harbors a secret, and a clue lurks on her skin. [EW]

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

Yes, I know the idea of a Whedonless Buffy sounds like blasphemy, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like exactly what Buffy and Joss need, even if the hardcore fans don't agree. Join the dots that are my scattered reasoning:

Joss Whedon Has Had More Than Seven Years Of Buffy, Let Someone Else Have A Go
We've seen Joss do Buffy for seven years on television (and two years in comics, for that matter), and do Buffy really well for at least six of those years (I'm one of those people who was unconvinced by the relentless, seemingly-aimless angst of season six. Sorry); that's never going away, no matter what - You all have those DVDs and the reruns and the comics to prove it. But just because Joss created Buffy and did the franchise proud for more than a decade doesn't mean that someone else can't come up with something equally as interesting, and almost as enjoyable. For whatever reason - and this isn't the place to argue about whether or not it's a good thing - our culture has become endlessly recyclable, whether it's movie or TV show reboots or comics where every year sees a new writer, artist and "creative direction." By now, we've had enough Battlestar Galacticas, The Dark Knights and Alan Moore taking on Swamp Things to know that letting new voices take on familiar characters can end in wonderful new versions of old stories, and leave the characters all the better for the experience. Who's to say that a new writer or new director couldn't bring something unexpected and amazing to the Buffy mythos?

(And, if it turned out to be another Bionic Woman or Knight Rider, so what? Like I said, it doesn't invalidate or undo all the stories you already loved, and it's not like the show would've been canceled to make way for this new version. The Whedon Buffy would be left as intact as ever.)

Joss Whedon Has Had More Than Seven Years Of Buffy, Let Him Do Something Else
I don't mean to be overly rude, but have you been reading the Buffy comics recently? Have you noticed that the series has become slightly... aimless? Directionless? There's undoubtedly a nicer way to say it, but after a strong start, it's become infected with the same apathy that laced through the television show's final two seasons; everything that happens - what little has actually happened, since the end of the Fray arc - feels less organic and more like writers filling time while trying to work out what to do next. As an example of where Whedon's head is at as concerning Buffy, it's a pretty good reason for him not to be involved with the movie, because it's as if he's run out of things to say about the character.

Not that that's a bad thing. He's got Dollhouse to think about, now, and Cabin In The Woods, as well; it feels kind of insulting to think that he should always have to be responsible for something he came up with seventeen years ago, instead of being allowed to let it go and move on to newer ideas, projects and things to talk about. It's also somewhat unreasonable; despite his closeness to the material and his ownership of it (in the sense of having invented it, not the legal sense, I mean), why should Whedon still be thinking about the same characters, situations and metaphors six years after it stopped being part of his everyday life (Almost six years to the day, in fact; the final episode went out May 20th, 2003)?

Creators create, or else they stagnate. That's not to say that there's no value in writers staying with characters for a long time (Dave Sim on Cerebus, for example), but there is evidence of diminishing returns when they stay with a story too long (The Phantom Menace, anyone? Or, on a slightly less obvious - yet probably more appropriate - slant, the latter part of Stan Lee's run as Spider-Man writer). With Firefly, Dr. Horrible and Dollhouse, as troubled as some may have been in terms of production and reception, you can see Whedon try to move on from Buffy. Why not let him?

Part of the outcry might be because the idea of this new Buffy movie changes our idea of what it is - Suddenly, it's a renewable franchise, instead of a creator-led show. But it always has been, as much as we forget it; there's been the movie, the TV show, the spin-off show, the comics, the novels, the video games, the very-unlike-the-actors action figures... it's never really just been Joss's show, as much as it's tempting to think that. Sure, Joss Whedon made Buffy, and in turn, Buffy made Whedon into what he is today, but perhaps it's time to let them say goodbye to each other and go on and grow up apart. The very worst that can happen* is that we end up with a disappointing movie version that we all pretend doesn't exist in years to come, and if fandom can survive this year's Watchmen and Terminator Salvation, then I think we can deal with a Buffy that doesn't live up to our dreams.

(* - Okay, alternatively, we could discover that Joss Whedon is actually a magical figure whose existence is entirely contingent on our belief in his version of Buffy, a la Tinkerbell, but somehow I'm not entirely convinced that that'll turn out to be the case.)

We asked you guys what you thought about T3 versus T4 and the majority of you voted that it was either much better, or at least slightly better. I narrowed down the most important aspects of the Terminator franchise, and weighed them side by side.

John Connor:

T3: Nick Stahl was a depressing casting choice, who has thus far carried the title of "worst John Connor ever." But his character's story was at least slightly more interesting to watch than one-note Bale. Still the voice-cracking teary-faced "Why me?" moments got real old, real fast.

T4: While a completely intimidating military leader, his inability to make anyone remember why they loved the little rapscallion smart ass from T2 brought out zero audience identification for the troubled savior of man. Plus, he was kind of a dick.

Winner: T4. Even though Bale leaned a little too much on the Batman voice, he was still a much more believable bad ass than Nick Stahl could ever hope to be.

The Big Action Scene:

T3: Watching Arnold get dragged through building after building (debris and glass flying) all while dangling on the end of the crane zooming down the road was one of the two saving grace moments from Terminator 3. More importantly, it looked and felt believable. Say what you will about Jonathan Mostow, his decision to use real props and stunt men gave the big action scene a sense of realism.

T4: When the Harvester let out its robo-moan, I got excited. But watching the giant robo-monster pluck the kindly old lady out of the gas station and then swing and miss an easy target while our heroes peeled out in front of it was pretty unforgivable. Sure you could argue that the bots would never fire on Marcus, but that didn't stop them in LA, or keep them from throwing him off the side of the prisoner transport. But if you open up that can of worms, you've got to start debating why the machines were dumb enough to keep Kyle Reese prisoner in the first place, and not just execute him on sight. (Boom — future John Connor, dead.) Already there's entirely too much thinking for an action scene. Also if you're going to build moto-Terminators with built-in guns, make them use it. This way, some jerk who's lost in time and his two kid sidekicks won't be able to take them out in a few minutes.

Winner: T3. Shoot as many moto-transformers out of the Harverster's legs you want, in the end it all felt like a Transformer with terrible aim. Give me Arnold getting thrown through cement walls.

Friendly Terminators:

T3: Seeing an aged Arnold picking up a coffin and taking on a pack of cops was, well, frighteningly upsetting and silly (and boy did they run with it — remember the heinous star sunglasses?). But the one thing Arnold had over Marcus was a sense of realism. Watching the original Terminator knife open his own chest, ripping away his fleshy covering was, well, freaking cool. That robot just cut into his chest with a knife!

T4: Sadly, Marcus' robot innards (while part human) always looked and felt like a failed Photoshop contest. And let's not forget his magic ability to heal off-screen because damn, CG is expensive, so thank God we threw that line in the script. Also, not once, even when he was fighting off other Terminators, did I get a feel for his super-strength or robot abilities. Nor did I believe that he had any sort of emotional attachment to Kyle Reese that would validate his big rescue attempt.

Winner: T4. While Arnold appeared to be a more realistic robot with his flappy exoskeleton bits and charred flesh (which is really saying something when you look at the money McG had to make Marcus seem like a half human half robot) the insufferable robot feelings climax throws the win to Marcus. Let's all thank the robot gods we didn't have to sit through another "I....can't...control...my...functions...John Connor....having....feelings" red to blue view finder moment.

Bad Terminators:

T3: I've heard many a "thanks, but no thanks," to the T-X after she came out. Granted, her excessive amount of robot gadgetry seemed forced and got a little confusing at times (why doesn't she shape shift more? And if she can control all robots, why doesn't she attack John Connor through other machines?). But the T-X was above all things ruthless. Her primary function was to kill the human leaders of the Resistance, and that was always in the front of her mind. The she-terminator stuck to the franchise robot code that is, kill, kill, kill. Which made her frightening. Especially when she walked into a house full of kids and opened fire at point blank range. This is a robot that wants to kill you, not kidnap you in some poorly thought out plan and then leave only one Terminator to guard the door, when they have an ARMY being made in "the basement." Also the blood-licking DNA decoding scene was delightful. I was sometimes scared of this robot, which is more than I can say for the pack of blundering puppets from our Doomsday future.

T4: Was seeing the CG T-800 with the face of Arnold neat? yes. But the impact of that moment passed minutes after uttering the phrase "Hey, cool." The T-800 was not scary, and neither was Skynet. Never did I ever get the feeling of being menaced by superior robot intellect. Maybe the fight scene was difficult to follow, or perhaps it was because the T-800 insisted on throwing John Connor about when we all know it could snap his neck in seconds. It was a muddle of incompetence.

Winner: T3, for making a robot that never stopped trying to kill humans.

Kate Brewster (Connor)

T3: Claire Danes was not good in this movie. There was zero chemistry (from her end) and I just couldn't get on board with anything she did as Kate. Did she even care when her fiance was murdered? This character came across as a whiny girl, who conveniently knows how to fly a plane. I couldn't listen to her talk about so-and-so's basement for another second.

T4: Bryce Dallas Howard is a wonderful actress who was given nothing to do but stand around and make bug eyes for the entire movie. This is not her fault.

Winner: T4. For not having Claire Danes in the film.

The Big Finale:

T3: The whole thing was a lie. Judgment Day was inevitable. The two kids are tricked by a caring father into an underground bomb shelter, thereby just missing the nuclear war. This was the second saving grace moment of T3 and possibly the best part of the film. As a viewer, you kind of got the feeling it was being set up, but the big reveal was still shocking. Plus the bomb shelter was time-capsule gorgeous, and part of me wanted to live down there and start on the Resistance — after we killed Danes and ate her for sustenance, of course.

T4: Marcus gets his second chance, by giving John Connor his heart. Do we care about his second chance? Not really. No one ever truly believed a dude who befriended orphaned kids in a run-down future was ever really that bad to start off with. So the whole "this is your moment, Marcus" thing was a total waste. But it all worked out in the end, and the team flies away on the wings of helicopter angels to have a big teddy-bear picnic in the sky. From high above, Marcus looks down from Heaven and winks. John Connor lifts his weak limb and shoots back a thumbs up, to heaven. And for one moment in the hell we call a future, things are A-OK. At least that's what I got out of it.

Winner: T3.

So as of right now, it's a tie. Hmmm, I leave it in your hands. But I'm starting to lean more towards T3, which at least doesn't have a wily sidekick child in it, who just so happens to have a bag of convenient tools on her at all times. But that's just me.

Oh, and this rant has spoilers, although I'll try to keep the Terminator Salvation spoilers as vague as possible. If you haven't watched all of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and want to stay unspoiled, now's a good time to stop reading.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had an admittedly uneven run over one and a half seasons, but its last six episodes were among the strongest hours of television I've ever watched. The show ended so strongly, it elevated everything that had come before. Most of all, T:SCC made a powerful argument that after 25 years, Terminator still had plenty of compelling stories to tell, and fascinating places to go. It might have been based on a couple of chase movies about time traveling killer robots, but T:SCC crafted a narrative that's stuck in my head since the show ended.

By contrast, Terminator Salvation was making a strong statement that the Terminator franchise is played out, and there are no new stories to tell about it. You can have more killer robots, and bigger killer robots — much, much bigger killer robots, in fact — but you can't really tell a different story, or reveal more about why John Connor is the chosen leader of the Resistance and what those killer robots are really about.

But I'm not going to spend a lot of time trashing T4 — I've already done that plenty, and it only makes me feel depressed. Instead, here are some reasons why I miss Sarah Connor Chronicles more than ever, after watching Terminator Salvation.

First of all, I missed Sarah Connor Chronicles' smart portrayal of artificial intelligence, and whether a machine that passes the Turing Test is actually human, or something different. The basic premise of Terminator, after all, is that Skynet has to create robots that can pass for human, so that they can infiltrate the Resistance and kill targets like Sarah and John Connor. But because the robots are sophisticated enough to pass for human, they're also capable of learning and taking on some human characteristics — and Terminator 2 delves into this, as John Connor changes the T-800's chip from read-only to writeable, so the T-800 can start learning to be "less of a dork."

In Sarah Connor Chronicles, we drill down into this idea a lot more deeply, as Summer Glau's Terminator, Cameron, tries to learn to imitate a human as John Connor's bodyguard — and becomes a bit of a seductress, experimenting with nail polish and kicky leopard-print tops... and even trying to seduce John Connor on a couple occasions. The scene in the final episode, where she gets John Connor to lay on top of her, so he can help her open up her insides and do a self-test, is incredibly creepy and sexual and mindblowing. And then there's John Henry, the baby A.I. that's learning by leaps and bounds, becoming obsessed with Bionicles action figures and then learning to play Dungeons and Dragons. In the season finale, John Henry escapes to the future, after Skynet apparently tries to destroy him. I would have loved to see the childlike John Henry wandering around the post-apocalyptic landscape, surveying his "brother's" handiwork and taking in all the scope of human suffering for the first time.

Even more than asking if a robot could be human, or if a person with metal parts could still be human, Sarah Connor Chronicles had the guts to ask other questions, like whether machines that could pass for human might still have their own type of intelligence. Their own kinds of emotions, and even their own kinds of secrets.

I also miss Sarah Connor's take on the future apocalypse. It's a war, but it's also an organized atrocity and a descent into hell. The show didn't have the budget to show us endless scenes of people blowing up machines, so instead it creeped us out with tons of images of torture and weirdness, including the house where everyone was dragged, one by one, into the basement with the weird piano music. Or the weird tortures Charlie Fischer imposed on Derek Reese, or the torments that Cameron committed against the human she was based on, Alison from Palmdale.

Whenever we meet someone from the future, they always seem haunted — almost literally — by horrendous spectres. I just rewatched "Ourselves Alone," the final episode featuring Riley, the girl from the future, and there's a great bit where she picks up a tube of floor-bleach and stares at its warning label: "Deadly To Humans And Animals," and you can just tell she's thinking about mass-produced horrors and things that we've built but which then turn out to kill us. Most of all, Brian Austin Green is just haunting to watch as Derek Reese, John Connor's uncle from the future. He puts so much into every line of dialog, and every random facial expression, that he's like a big-budget splodefest by himself.

Which brings me to the third thing I really miss about Sarah Connor Chronicles: the performances. I came away from Terminator Salvation with a renewed appreciation for the deep characterization that T:SCC served up every week. Besides Green, Summer Glau and Garret Dillahunt managed to bring an amazing range of expression to their robotic characters, without ever becoming too human or leaving behind the original Schwarzenegger impassiveness. Lena Headey was utterly compulsive as the "is she really crazy," hard-assed, sarcastic Sarah Connor — rewatch her scenes when she's in jail and the FBI agent is baiting her, from the season finale: she's just totally in control of herself, and yet at the same time not at all in control of herself. She doesn't give the predatory FBI agent the slightest opening, even as she's revealing all sorts of flashes of vulnerability and humor and doubt to us, the viewers. Even Thomas Dekker's John Connor, who took a long time to grow on me, was selling me on his future-resistance-leader persona by the end.

These were real, complicated, messed up people, making mistakes but also being brave and generous, in the face of the probably inevitable end of the world. You couldn't help but root for them.

And then the last thing I find myself missing a lot about Sarah Connor Chronicles is the complexity. The show kept the basic Skynet=evil premise, but added a million grey areas and crazy twists on top of that. You had the other faction of A.I.s, represented by Shirley Manson's Catherine Weaver, who seemed to be at odds with Skynet, or at least to have their own agenda. You had the whole quesion of whether the future version of John Connor has become too dependent on machines to do his fighting for him, and whether he's been compromised as a result. (Or whether Connor is really even Connor any more.) You also had the constant question of how far our heroes will go to win — will they kill other humans? Will they betray people? How machine-like will the resistance against the machines become?

Terminator Salvation was never going to be as deep as the television series: that's just the nature of a movie. Movies get two hours, give or take, to pose a single scenario and play it out, with a definite ending. At the same time, Terminator 2 managed to take the premise of the first movie and expand it outwards, like an aerial camera panning back, to show us the bigger picture. It took us inside the head of the Terminator and also explained more about how Skynet came about and why it ends everything. And it got a lot deeper into the character of Sarah Connor and her relationship with her son. So it's definitely possible for a two-hour-ish movie to go to some interesting places.

Of the Terminator iterations that have come about since T2, only Sarah Connor Chronicles picked up the metal robotic gauntlet that T2 threw down, and ran with it. Only the television show justified its existence as a followup to that classic sequel, by taking its ideas further and delving deeper into its world. If, as seems pretty likely, the Terminator franchise goes back into deep freeze for a long time until we get some new remake or reboot a dozen years from now, the only thing I'll miss is Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The Roboshake shirt from Nerdyshirts.com even comes with its own backstory:

In the year 2102, after the great robot-human battle, robots will enslave the human race. It won' t be until 2109 when a lone robot speaks out against the treatment of humans that the human race will once again be free. This shirt is going to be so popular that year.

Well, it makes more sense than the end of Terminator Salvation.

Roboshake [Nerdyshirts]

TERMINATOR:
Well I guess it's true, the franchise really is on its last legs.



V:
Well I'm sure that for those of you in the antiseptic world known as Canada the new V will seem frighteningly real and terrifying. For the rest of us, well, they canceled Sarah Connor so an hour was just freed up for the week.


FLASH FORWARD:
A show where people see the future. Some people see days of terror, some see sad days, while some see... happy days.


STAR TREK:
New Blu-Ray editions of the Star Trek films came out this week with some new special features showing that they were really trying to break some new ground on the first film by working with some different artists and concepts... it didn't fly.



PEDISEDATE:
Well, a very very big mystery was solved this week. The Mystery of "what the living hell is that exactly?" in the io9 logo.



IT'S A DISASTER!!!:
Now I say this as someone who is a big fan of the original series so take that as you may, but...

Have a good holiday everyone. I need it.

Garrison Dean's real name is not Garrison Dean.

As we suggested yesterday, Night At The Museum 2 has beaten Terminator Salvation to take the crown of the Memorial Day weekend box office; final estimates show Ben Stiller's reanimated comedy making $53.5 million in the Friday-Sunday period, while Salvation trails behind with $43.0 million. Worryingly for McG and Christian Bale, this ends up being a million dollars less than the opening weekend for Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, even before you adjust for inflation in ticket sales, and things only look worse for the new movie when you do the math. Box Office Mojo has pointed out that both T2 and T3 sold more tickets than the current movie, and added:

Based on the patterns of past Memorial debuts, the highest that Terminator can climb is around $57 million for the four-day weekend, which would give it more than $70 million in five days. Unadjusted, Terminator 3 made $72.4 million in its first five and a half days.

So why the disappointing turnout (For some sense of comparison, Star Trek had an opening weekend of around $75 million)? Warner Bros are suggesting that the movie's narrow target demographic was hurt by what else was happening this weekend:

Time Warner Inc (TWX.N)-owned Warner Bros. said "Terminator" was likely more affected by competition for older men from the National Basketball Association playoffs, which hurt business in cities like Los Angeles.

Alternatively, the bad reviews may have taken their toll. Or, just maybe - as blasphemous as this may sound - mainstream audiences just aren't that interested in dystopian machine-controlled future war right now.

To its credit, Salvation has outperformed 2003's Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines in its first two days at the box office, giving McG and star Christian Bale something to smile - or grimace and shout their names loudly for no immediately apparent reason, perhaps - about (Salvation has made $28.3 million in its first two days, against T3's $24.3 million). Yesterday, however, saw the much-anticipated movie lose out to the Ben Stiller sequel vehicle, which grossed $15.3 million to Salvation's $14.8 million.

With critical reaction to both movies generally pretty unfavorable - Night At The Museum 2 getting a 43% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and Terminator Salvation getting 34% - it'll be down to word of mouth to see which movie ultimately triumphs this weekend. Call me cynical, but my money's on the feel-good movie that doesn't feature the slow and deliberate destruction of the human race.

'Museum' tops 'Terminator' Friday [Hollywood Reporter]