Despite Aliens director James Cameron complaining about Dark Fate, pulled off almost the same opening — and did it worse. Avatar creator James Cameron famously hated the opening scene of David Fincher’s dark, muddled Alien 3, and he wasn’t alone in his dislike of the bleak twist the scene pulled off.
Cameron famously berated Alien 3’s opening for killing off Newt and Bishop (even though this was the right choice for the Alien franchise), as he felt it was a mean trick to play on audiences, and took the franchise in too dark of a direction. Even so, decades later, Terminator: Dark Fate - a franchise installment produced and co-written by Cameron - pulled off the exact same move.
In the opening scene of 2019’s box office bomb, Dark Fate, the franchise’s time-hopping hero John Connor is relaxing on a beach and enjoying some well-earned downtime after multiple movies of chasing and attempted assassinations from the eponymous robot. It’s nice to see the character chilling out for once — until Connors is unceremoniously killed off by a Terminator, that is. It’s an audaciously similar opening to Alien 3, which got in trouble with fans and critics alike for killing off Newt and Bishop before the movie even began in earnest. Not only does Dark Fate borrow the scene from Alien 3, this Terminator installment’s iteration of the opening might be even darker than that of Fincher’s movie.
The Terminator franchise hasn't returned to its slasher roots since the 1984 original, but the closest it has come is in Dark Fate’s vicious opening scene. It’s arguably even darker than Alien 3’s infamous sequence. Although Newt and Bishop were well-loved characters who humanized the franchise's tough action heroine Ripley, in comparison to John Connor, they weren’t humanity’s only hope of survival. Yes, Dark Fate does soon give viewers Dani - the film’s real protagonist - who ably fills the hero role in John’s permanent absence, but it’s still a steal for this movie to open on the violent death of a kid hero, given how much Cameron claimed to hate Alien 3.
Cameron’s problem with the opening was that it was a slap in the face for the loyal fans of the franchise, and felt it wasted the personal connection that Terminator Salvation’s original ending. It’s a worst of both worlds pay-off wherein John Connor’s death was nowhere near as surprising as it would have been in Salvation, an earlier Terminator installment, but had a far larger knock-on effect on the series' plot than Alien 3’s choice to kill off Newt and Bishop.
