Although Ridley Scott is down to take on gladiators and aliens, the Terminator franchise is where he drew the line.
The 4x Oscar-nominated director claimed he passed on an eight-figure payday to helm Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines as he thought he’d “fuck it up” by trying to “make it real.”
“I’m proud about this. I turned down a $20M fee. See, I can’t be bought, dude,” he told The Guardian. “Someone said: ‘Ask what Arnie gets.’ I thought: ‘I’ll try it out.’ I said: ‘I want what Arnie gets.’ When they said yes, I thought: ‘Fuck me.’ But I couldn’t do it. It’s not my thing.”
Scott continued, “It’s like doing a Bond movie. The essence of a Bond movie is fun and camp. Terminator is pure comic strip. I would try to make it real. That’s why they’ve never asked me to do a Bond movie, because I could fuck it up.”
Following James Cameron‘s work on The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jonathan Mostow took over the director’s chair on the third installment, which brought back Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s titular killing machine, starring alongside Nick Stahl and Claire Danes.
Claire Danes, Nick Stahl and Arnold Schwarzenegger in ‘Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines’ (2003) (Warner Brothers/Courtesy Everett Collection)
The franchise has expanded to include Terminator Salvation (2009), Terminator Genisys (2015) and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), as well as the Fox series spin-off Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-’09).
Last year, the animated series Terminator Zero debuted on Netflix, featuring the voices of Timothy Olyphant, Sonoya Mizuno, Rosario Dawson, Ann Dowd and André Holland.
