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SYFY WIRE Terminator: Dark Fate

Terminator: Dark Fate star Mackenzie Davis talks franchise fatigue: 'Six is too much, now we know'

By Josh Weiss
Mackenzie Davis Terminator Dark Fate

It may be time to shut down Skynet for a while and allow for Terminator franchise fatigue to abate. Recently appeaing on MTV's Happy Sad Confused podcast, actress Mackenzie Davis opened up about the lukewarm reception to Terminator: Dark Fate. Critic reviews and fan reactions were mostly positive (it holds a 70 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but the film — which was produced by series progenitor James Cameron and directed by Deadpool's Tim Miller — only mustered $261 million at the global box office.

"Nobody saw the last three. I get it, it’s ok. I don’t think that means what we made was bad, but I understand that the audience’s appetite had been exhausted," said Davis, who played Grace, a cybernetically-enhanced soldier from the future. "How much you attribute that to there being three women in the lead, I don’t know. I never really wanted to engage with that stuff because I can’t control it. I am a woman and I really like the part and I felt proud of what I did, so I couldn’t be like, ‘No one’s seen it because they’re sexist!’ It seemed like an easier answer for me to be like, ‘Alright, six is too much, now we know.”

Davis also addressed the creative head-butting between Miller and Cameron. "There are always going to be [conflicts] if you really give a sh** about what you’re making, or else you just have somebody parroting the corporate interests instead of trying to make some type of art within this very corporate machine," she explained. "Tim was an incredible director. He was so dedicated and devoted to making it the best thing it could be.”

When asked about a possible sequel to Dark Fate, Davis parried with: "When does an NDA expire?" Since Grace died at the end of the most recent film, the actress hinted that the next one (unlikely to be made at this point) would bring her character back by taking place in the future from whence she came.

"I think it was gonna be sort of a timeline thing, where there’d be another timeline that you’d explore," she teased. "There’s no resurrection, but she came from the future so…"