Terminator: Dark Fate (watch it HERE) was supposed to revitalize the Terminator franchise. Franchise creator James Cameron was back as producer and assembled a writers room to craft the story for an entire trilogy of new Terminator sequels… but then Dark Fate turned out to be a box office disappointment, and those trilogy plans were tossed out the window. The same exact thing that happened when previous sequels Terminator: Salvation and Terminator: Genisys were both supposed to start their own trilogies.
One of the standout elements of Dark Fate was the performance of Mackenzie Davis as Grace, a cybernetically enhanced super soldier from the future. Grace didn't make it out of the film alive, but during an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast Davis revealed that Grace's death wouldn't have prevented her from coming back for the sequel if Dark Fate had been successful.
Davis said Grace was going to return due to some alternate timeline / time travel trickery:
It was gonna be a sort of timeline thing, where there'd be another timeline that you'd explore. Like, there's no resurrection, but she came from the future, so…"
So if you liked watching Grace in action in Terminator: Dark Fate, the sequel was going to give you more of what you liked. But it doesn't look like Dark Fate is going to be getting any sort of direct follow-up, and Davis's co-star Linda Hamilton has said she would "be quite happy to never return" to the role of Sarah Connor. "I would really love to be done."
As for why Dark Fate failed, Davis suggests that audiences are just tired of Terminator movies, and have been for a while.
Nobody saw the last three. I get it, it's okay. I don't think that means what we made was bad, but I understand that the audience's appetite had been exhausted. 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.'"
Directed by Tim Miller from a screenplay by David S. Goyer, Justin Rhodes, and Billy Ray, Terminator: Dark Fate only acknowledged the events of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, ignoring the other sequels. The film found that Hamilton's Sarah Connor was
a grizzled lone wolf who must team up with a mechanically enhanced female soldier to protect another young woman targeted by Terminators.
Davis and Hamilton were joined in the cast by Natalia Reyes as new heroine Dani Ramos, Diego Boneta as Dani's brother, Gabriel Luna as the latest villainous Terminator, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as an older, bearded Terminator who goes by the name Carl.