After scoring his breakthrough role as Conan the Barbarian’s titular protagonist, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fame soared even higher when he portrayed the cyborg assassin classified as the T-800 in The Terminator, one of the best sci-fi movies of all time. This launched a sci-fi franchise that is arguably the thing he’s remains most famous for in his acting career. But even Schwarzenegger is willing to admit his least favorite of the Terminator movies, and his answer’s hilariously on brand.
While making the press rounds for FUBAR Season 2, which is now streaming with a Netflix subscription alongside the anime series Terminator Zero, Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped by Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen and partook in the Bravo program’s After Show segment. It was during this that he was asked by a fan what he considered to be the worst Terminator movie, and he answered:
I would say the worst was probably the number four [Terminator Salvation]. Because that was done during the time I was governor and I was not in it. How do you make a Terminator movie without me being in the Terminator movie? It doesn’t make any sense.
He makes a fair point. Terminator Salvation was released in 2009, six years after Schwarzenegger starred in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which arrived five months before he began serving as the 38th Governor of California. By the time Salvation rolled around, he’d already been reelected, so there wasn’t any way to carry out his political duties and play a new version of the T-800. However, as you’ll see below, Salvation did still include Schwarzenegger’s likeness for one of the first T-800s, with Roland Kickinger physically portraying the character.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s certainly entitled to dislike Terminator Salvation because he wasn’t in it, but the movie itself certainly didn’t fare well with general audiences for other reasons. The tale following Christian Bale’s John Connor in a post-apocalyptic 2018 earned primarily negative reception and underperformed at the box office. Throw in how The Halcyon Company, which owned the Terminator rights at the time, filed for bankruptcy shortly after the movie’s release, and plans for Salvation’s sequels were scrapped.
Unfortunately, the next two Terminator movies, 2015’s Terminator Genisys and 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate, also failed to gain traction in theaters, though the latter movie was at least much more critically well received than the former. Arnold Schwarzenegger has also said he’s done with the franchise, and Linda Hamilton has no interest in playing Sarah Connor again. So if a seventh Terminator movie ever gets off the ground, it’ll basically need to be a full-blown reboot, which creator James Cameron has already considered.
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