Movie trailers have become such an important part of the process of making a movie that their release can be almost as important as the movie itself. But trailers have a fine line to walk because they have to tell people just enough to get them excited, without revealing so much that it ruins the movie. But sometimes movies intentionally reveal their big twists, which was apparently the plan with one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time. Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
in the original version terminatorArnold Schwarzenegger plays an unstoppable killing machine sent from the future to kill someone. When the sequel opens, a similar dynamic seems to set in. Arnold is introduced as the potential villain, and it’s not until the two Terminators from the future come face to face that we learn that the machine that was once the villain is now the hero. However, it was only a surprise if you had never seen a trailer for the film. In an interview with James Cameron of Empire , the director admits it was all for the twist because he felt that detail sold the film. Cameron explained…
We’ve all had our battles with Suits, but the case you mention wasn’t a battle. The Carolco guys Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna have been good partners with me on T2, and I’ve been driving the marketing load, including showing Arnold as the good guy. It wasn’t some Sixth Sense twist that isn’t revealed until the end of the film. He is revealed to be the Protector at the end of the first act. And I always feel like you lead with your strongest narrative element in selling a film. I thought our potential audience would be more drawn to how the badass killing machine could become a hero than just another murder fest in the same vein as the first film. The sequels have to strike a delicate balance between honoring the most beloved elements of the first film, but also promising to really shake things up and turn them around. Our marketing campaign for T2 delivered exactly that promise and it worked.
Never hidden before the release of T2 that Arnold, who was largely unknown when first terminator was released but he was a major action star at the time of the sequel, he would have been the good guy the second time around. But it was strange that the film treated it as a plot twist. And it almost certainly would have been a nice twist for the audience to live in the theater if the detail had been left behind the curtain.
Sure, one could imagine this to be a situation where James Cameron, as director, would have wanted the twist to remain under wraps, but studio execs decided they needed that detail to better sell the film. Cameron has certainly had his share of battles with the studios. But James Cameron is a director who also fully understands the commercial aspects of Hollywood. He makes art, but he understands that art has to sell, and Cameron is clearly pretty good at making movies that sell.
It’s hard to say that James Cameron didn’t make the right decision. terminator 2 it was a huge box office success that seems small today because the director made many even bigger films. Perhaps the twist revealed in the trailers of terminator 2and the fact that it did not affect the success of the film is one of the reasons why the decision was made to put the finishing touches Terminator: Genesisalthough it didn’t work out so well.
Source: Cinemablend
