James Cameron Defends Spoiling One of the Terminator 2 Biggest Twists
One of the biggest twist in Terminator 2: Judgment Day was Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 terminator now being a good guy – a reprogrammed unit from the same series as the original terminator, sent back to the past to protect John Connor from the more advanced liquid-metal T-1000, sent to kill him.
And one thing that bothered fans of the Terminator movies for a long, long time, was the fact that this twist was spoiled by Judgment Day's trailer.
In that trailer Schwarzenegger's T-800 appears in a mall hallway just in time to save John Connor (Edward Furlong) from T-1000 (Robert Patrick). Many assumed that this element of the trailer resulted from the studio's meddling.
However, this is not true. Cameron himself directed the marketing. And as he explained in a recent Empire Q&A (with numerous Hollywood celebrities asking him questions) that spoiler was a conscious decision on his part:
"The Carolco guys, Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, were good partners with me on T2, and I led the charge on marketing, including showing Arnold as the good guy."
Cameron immediately explained his reasoning for that:
"It wasn't a Sixth Sense kind of twist that's revealed only at the end of the film. He's revealed as the Protector at the end of Act One. And I always feel you lead with your strongest story element in selling a movie."
Well, Cameron is not wrong here. T-800 switching from the antagonist to the protagonist was the key story element of the movie. And while the movie kept ambiguous who was the villain here, until the first confrontation between the two terminators, the marketing campaign probably did right by indicating to the audience the biggest change that Terminator 2 intended to make to the original's formula. The spoiler worked.
Compare and contrast with the most recent installment in the franchise, Terminator: Dark Fate, which kept its big twist of killing John Connor off in very beginning out of its trailers. Not only in our day and age the spoilers got leaked anyway, but the audience got pissed off by the perceived bait and switch, resulting in Dark Fate's disappointing box office performance, and the whole franchise falling into slumber for now.