“Terminator 2: Judgement Day”
1991 • R • 2hs 17mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
👁️🐝↩️ I’ll Be Back: A Terminator & T2 Double-Feature
You’re reading Pizza & a Movie—rewinding the stories of rental classics. Tonight we’re wrapping up our I’ll Be Back Double Feature in 1995, when every kid had a dirt bike and ATMs spat out free cash. But it’s not all arcade games and telling off your stepdad. This time two Terminators are mixing it up for the fate of humanity. We’re narrowly evading a robot-based demise in James Cameron’s Hot Arnold Summer follow-up, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Here’s the plot. It’s eleven years later and we’re seeing double. Two man-shaped cybernetic assassins appear in '95 LA in their altogether. They came in two sizes. You’ve got your size XL, an older T-800 model (Arnold Schwarzenegger) refurbished by the human resistance of 2029. And you’ve got your size S, a brand-spankin’-new T-1000 (Robert Patrick) care of our future robot overlords.
This time they’re looking for ten-year-old John Connor (Edward Furlong). He lives with foster parents while his mom, Sarah (Linda Hamilton), does a stretch in the psych ward. Turns out when you know the clock’s ticking for humanity it really bakes your noodle. The T-800 barely saves John from the shape-shifting T-1000 at the mall, hot bed of juvenile delinquency and beweaponed foot chases. The Terminator tells John his mom was telling the God’s honest truth all this time, she just didn’t have proof. Now he’s all the proof anybody needs. But can they break her out before the bad guy gets to her? And even if they do, how to do they stop the apocalypse? And is “Daddy of Terminators” Miles Dyson (Joe Morton) gonna believe any of this?
How to Revive a Terminator
Director James Cameron didn’t want to make a sequel. Felt like the story was done after one. Funny for a guy who’s partway through filming his fourth of five Avatar movies. I suppose his other big hit in recent memory, Titanic, doesn’t exactly scream “sequel potential”.
Know who did want to make a sequel? IP holders and Arnold Schwarzenegger, that’s who. Things had charged for Arnold since making The Terminator in ’84. He’d become king of action flicks with entries like Commando (’85) and Predator (’87), done sci-fi again with Total Recall (’90) and worked on his funny bone with Twins (’88) and Kindergarten Cop (’90). The big guy had a real-deal film career to think about now. What better way to tie all the threads together than to return to his most iconic character, building a sequel around his newfound range?
Cameron didn’t really have a say. Struggling studio Hemdale owned 50% of the Terminator rights, but Cameron had gotten in a fistfight with the head honcho when they tried to change the first movie’s ending. They weren’t pals. Cameron’s ex-wife, Gale Anne Heard, producer of the fist movie, got the other 50% in their divorce. With everyone fighting, no sequel would happen. Schwarzenegger swooped in with an intro to Carolco Pictures, who’d produced Total Recall. Carolco bought Hemdale’s half for $10M, another $5M to Gale for hers. Suddenly both studio and star were ready.
But before anybody’d typed a word of the script, T2 was already in the hole for $15M. Tough start.
Deadline, Deadline, Deadline
The studio told Cameron they’d pay him $7M to write the script and help out. But also that they were making T2 with or without him. Oh, and he only had 6 weeks to come up with the story and write the script. Carolco their heart set on a Memorial Day premier—May 27, 1991. Nothing more American than Terminatoring with guns blazing. The premier would shift back to Independence Day weekend later, but they didn’t know that now.
Cameron went back to writer friend William Wisher—with whom he’d written the first movie—to crack the sequel story. And boy did they ever crack it. But it took a few rounds to get there. Here’s how things progressed:
💪💪 Version 1
Good humans and bad robots both send back Arnolds this time. It’s like twins fighting each other! Double the Arnold, Arniemania sweeps the nation, everybody wins Oscars and buys new vacation homes.
But, they thought, twins fighting might look stupid. Or boring? Or both! Back to the drawing board.
💪🚜 Version 2
Humans send back an Arnold but robots send back a huge mega-Terminator. This thing’ll make Schwarzenegger look like a tiny baby! What’s bigger than Arnold? Something literally bigger!
But, they thought, Arnold might hate being the lil’ guy. And it might be expensive to build a house-sized Terminator. On to the next idea.
💪💦 Version 3
Humans send back an Arnold, robots send back a liquid metal shape-shifter. Sure, it’s a leftover idea Cameron couldn’t cram into the original. Yes, sometimes leftovers go stale. But everybody loves two kinds of leftovers: Pizza and Terminators.
The cowriters went with Version 3. This time Wisher stayed at Cameron’s house for a month. He wrote the first half the movie while Cameron wrote the back half. They met in the middle.
Not a Repeat
Cameron made T2 different. Maybe it was time of life—he was 36 by ’90. Maybe doing pretty much the same thing twice sounded boring. Maybe making Aliens (’86) taught him how to turn a slasher flick into an action smorgasbord. Whatever the reason, he focused on story over concept this time. And this story’s about a family.
The big decision, the one that changed everything, was that the Terminators wouldn’t go after Sarah again. It was John this time. They beefed it at killing her but, as the saying goes, if you at first you don’t succeed, go eleven years fewer back in time and try again. In ’84, Sarah’s story was about a woman adrift. Without a meaningful job, relationship or connection to her own time. Kyle Reese portal’d in and changed that. But John is just a kid, too young for even a quarter life crisis. But he is missing things too.
What does John not have? A lot. A mom, a dad, a firm idea of how the world works. Call it “family” for short. T2 sets about spending its first half building him a family. Schwarzenegger’s T-800, at first John’s weird not-age-appropriate friend, becomes the key to getting his mom back. But quickly he becomes John’s father figure, someone who protects him, listens to him, changes because of him. He becomes more human the longer he’s with John. In fact Cameron compared John’s influence on the T-800 to the Tin Man getting a heart in The Wizard of Oz.
Because T2 focuses on John’s story, it totals up to a very different movie than the first. And a much more commercial one. It’s not a genre flick, it’s a blockbuster. The kid and Arnold and their you’re-gonna-make-me-cry reliance on each other deliver movie star performances.
They Understood the Assignment
To tell this kind of story, Terminator 2 needed more out of its characters. So how’d the actors playing them get ready?
Arnold Schwarzenegger: The beast from the east trained for two things. Moving without flinching when stuff was on fire and/or exploding around him, and saying bigger words more with bigger feelings. Ultimately, he was the best special effect in the movie. But what did he care about? “Just make me look cool,” he said.
Linda Hamilton: The woman worked out three hours a day six days a week to look shredded like lettuce. She was the same age then as I am now, but my fitness level is more “works at a keyboard and goes for a walk sometimes”. Hamilton developed her feral, single-minded character to account for the social isolation involved in knowing too much. In her words, "The irony of this film is that Arnold is a better mother than I am, and I'm a better Terminator than he is."
Robert Patrick: In contrast to Arnie’s automaton movements, Patrick’s T-1000 moves like water. He trained to load weapons, shoot and sprint at full speed without breaking focus or showing exertion. By filming time, he could snap off rounds and reload at John Wick-level speed without even looking. He chose a head-slightly-down pose for his scenes to recreate the advancing movement of a predator.
Edward Furlong: This was Furlong’s first movie. He’d never acted before, possessing a freshness Cameron made sure not to lose. Furlong trained to fix and load weapons with such confidence he could reel off dialogue, give sidelong looks, and still remember what he was doing.
Joe Morton: While Hamilton’s Sarah was our audience surrogate in T1, Morton’s character makes us think about what we would do in T2. To deliver his not-up-to-speed not-one-of-you performance, he kept his distance from the cast. He does the hard job of looking scared of yet smart enough to invent a Terminator chip.
At the Box Office
Terminator 2 was hard to make. It took six months to shoot. Post-production folks worked in 24-hours shifts and slept in the office up until two days before premier. Film prints weren’t delivered to theaters until the night before showings began. So was it worth it? What did the humans of ’91 think?
Critics liked the effects and cinematic style. They marveled at the eye-popping imagination rendered realistically on-screen, calling Cameron “our reigning master of heavy-metal action”. As with most of his movies, the director pioneered technology to achieve what was rolling around in his noggin. Some reviewers observed that the story turns melodramatic at times and the ending is conventional. They missed the point. James Cameron figured out how to turn a scary, gory movie into a highly commercial sequel. This wasn’t horror, it was action. This wasn’t gut-wrenching, it was heart-felt. This wasn’t just filmed under the stars, it had movie stars. Cameron made Terminator 2 a movie for everyone. We’re this far in! And I still don’t know how he did that.
His sequel cost $51M to make, plus another $20M or so in fees and salaries. Marketing took that $75M-ish figure up to $100M. It was the most expensive movie ever made at the time. That’s a lot of scratch to make back. The original Terminator only made $78M. But this was the nineties, baby, and everything worked out.
Terminator 2 opened on Wednesday, July 3rd, kicking off a long red, white and blue holiday weekend. It made a cool $12M the first day, $52M total over its first five days. While it was halfway to paying back its price tag, the wily studio had already sold distribution rights, cut VHS deals and secured cable partnerships to cover the whole production budget. So this was pure profit. T2 stayed number one at the box office for four weeks, going on to play for half a year. It did well outside the States too. Japan alone paid $51M to see it.
The worldwide take clocks in around half a billion dollars. That’s roughly $1.1B in today’s bucks. Ticket-buyers (which allegedly included just plain kids skateboarding up to the ticket window) loved it and saw it over and over again. T2 was an era-defining phenomenon. It won four Oscars (none for acting). It changed the industry too, ushering in a new age of digital filmmaking unlike anything that came before. Independence Day (’96), The Matrix (’99), and Cameron’s own Avatar (’09) wouldn’t have come along without it.
That’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day. And that’s it for our Double Feature, I’ll Be Back. Thanks for reading! I loved going back to a cable favorite I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. If you haven’t seen it lately, hope you put it on. It was as good as I remembered.
And hey, if you liked this one, share it with a pal who would too! Don’t let Judgement Day get ‘em.
NOTES:
When Sarah Connor and the psych ward security guard are imitated by the T-1000, their real-life twins are used to achieve the effect. Cheap and easy! Just be born with two of you. Done.
Dean Norris, Hank from Breaking Bad, is behind the mask of the SWAT team leader.
There’s a Frankenstein’s monster story buried at the center of T2. Dyson beholds what his work will do and sets about immediately undoing his unstoppable, uncontrollable creation.
The studio paid most of Schwarzenegger’s gigantic fee by buying him a $12M Gulfstream jet.
While T2 made a bunch of money—$500M—even in its own day it was behind Star Wars (’77) at $530M and E.T. (’82) at $617M. And those dollars aren’t adjusted to be an apples-to-apples comparison.
You could think of the water aliens from Cameron’s The Abyss (’89), his project before this one, as a practice run for the liquid metal T-1000.
T2 was the best-selling rental movie by January of 1992.
For a lot of my rewatch, I couldn’t figure out why the scenes with Sarah Connor didn’t crackle like everything else. By the end, I got that she’s really going for something here but doesn’t have the chops everyone else in her scenes does. Hate to say it, but she’s just not as good an actor.
This movie’s MacGuffin: Judgement Day.
“Come with me if you want to live” is the same line Kyle Reese used on Sarah Connor in The Terminator.
Cameron and screenwriter William Wisher said “Hasta la vista, baby” as an over-and-out for their phone conversations. What a couple of cool guys.