Christian Bale did Terminator: Salvation because he was told not to

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

I know TERMINATOR: SALVATION has its fans, but for me the only worthwhile thing that movie brought to the world was the recording of star Christian Bale going ballistic on cinematographer Shane Hurlburt for distracting him during a take. Speaking with IndieWire, Bale said he regrets that confrontation… and he isn't very pleased that he did the movie at all, especially since he didn't want to be in it in the first place.

Bale said, 

I said no three times. I thought that the franchise… I went 'Nah, there's no story there.' There's a perverse side to me, where people were telling me that, there's no way on God's Earth that I should take that role, and I was thinking the same thing. But when people started verbalizing that to me, I started to go, 'Oh really? All right, well watch this then.' So there was a little bit of that involved in the choice."

The film, directed by McG, went on to have a troubled production, and even though the screenplay is credited to John Brancato and Michael Ferris, a whole lot of other writers were brought in to do rewrites. Among the writers was Jonathan Nolan, who Bale says had a wonderful vision for the story… but Nolan had to leave to focus on another project.

Once he was involved with SALVATION, Bale had hopes that it would reinvigorate the franchise.

And unfortunately, during production, you could tell that wasn't happening. It's a great shame."

As for his blow-up on Hurlburt, Bale now calls it a "learning lesson".

No matter how much you lose yourself in a scene, you do not allow yourself to behave that way."

Made on a production budget around $200 million, TERMINATOR: SALVATION was released in May of 2009 and ended up making $365 million at the global box office, which wasn't enough for the filmmakers to pursue their idea of having SALVATION be the first entry in a new TERMINATOR trilogy. A fresh creative team came in to make TERMINATOR: GENISYS, which was also supposed to be the start of a new trilogy. That one was poorly received, too.

Franchise creator James Cameron and DEADPOOL director Tim Miller are now plotting a new TERMINATOR trilogy of their own.