Terminator Salvation was supposed to serve as a fresh start for the long-running sci-fi franchise. While a CG Arnold Schwarzenegger made a cameo appearance, it mostly succeeded in that respect but still struggled to resonate with moviegoers.
The idea had been to finally explore John Connor's fight against Skynet in the distant future (well, 2018), better explaining how the events of The Terminator came to be. A young Kyle Reese was also a pivotal part of the movie's plot and the T-800 even got an origin story; however, issues behind the scenes did little to help, and there was no saving Salvation.
After opening to mostly negative reviews, the reboot later grossed $371.4 million at the worldwide box office and led to another overhaul with the equally as disappointing Terminator Genisys.
Talking to ComicBook.com about his new movie Family Switch, Terminator Salvation helmer McG opened up on what he thinks went wrong with the Christian Bale/Sam Worthington-led blockbuster.
"We tried hard. On that one, we brought in Jonah Nolan to write it, there was a writers' strike back then," he recalls. "Brought in Christian Bale, you can't reach much higher than that. We certainly gave it everything we had. A lot of people like that movie, it didn't quite do what I hoped it was gonna do and I've been living with that wound a long time."
"There's a cut out there with an entirely different ending, I just can't share it with the world yet. It's beyond dark."
This isn't the first time we've heard about an alternate ending as McG previously said, "I think the film has started to age better. And there is a different cut: I have my own cut of that film and there's people online that talk about wanting to see that cut. I think I got a lot of things right with that."
He added, "I think I got to take the punch on that one for not quite nailing the landing on the final expression of that movie and, who knows, maybe the cut that I have of that movie hidden away is the answer. It's darker! I don't know, that's for the fans to say."
Short of it being thrown into some sort of future anniversary box set, we doubt that sequence will ever see the light of day. After a few recent misses (Terminator: Dark Fate also underwhelmed despite being a major improvement over its predecessors), the franchise has been shelved with no clear sign of what the plan is from here.
Stay tuned for Terminator updates as we have them.