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The Terminator franchise missed out on a huge cross-platform opportunity

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Terminator: The Sarah Connor ChroniclesI just got back from Terminator: Salvation (it was ... eh) and while I was watching it, I couldn't help but think about Fox's just-canceled Sarah Connor Chronicles. It was established when the show began that the two would be working in entirely different continuities. But why?

One of the things that made the first film such an impressive piece of film-making was that they were able to do such a dense science fiction film on a small budget. Now that franchise has turned into special effects and (BOOM!) explosions!! The lower budget forces you to get more creative with storytelling and you wind up with The Sarah Connor Chronicles. But what an opportunity the Terminator franchise had with both outlets occurring simultaneously. An opportunity totally squandered.

At its heart, the Terminator franchise is about time travel. Events occur both in the future post-Judgment Day and in the "present," where robots are sent back to kill Sarah and John and anyone else that looks at them funny. With the film franchise moving fully into that post-Judgment Day future with Salvation, they could have told both stories at once.

The present-day struggle to get John alive into that future and possibly destroy Skynet before Judgment Day happens was being chronicled very well in Sarah Connor. Then, after two seasons of that struggle they threw young John Connor into the future, right before the movie was set to come out. Now in Salvation, we see that future struggle and get to meet a young Kyle Reese (John Connor's father). The bigger budget would allow us to see that horrific future, which the film did very well.

Fans have been wanting this for years. Whenever a television series does well, we want a big movie some summer between seasons. Here was a huge movie franchise coming to television with a film on the horizon. It was absolutely begging to happen. And it could have been amazing. Season 3 would have opened stronger if there'd just been a tease about the events of the past in the film, and you'd have been set to build toward your next movie.

The next movie could have jumped a bit more into the future and shown us the moment when Kyle was sent back in time to young Sarah. We could have perhaps seen the development of the Cameron model and even some other things that could have been set up so well in the weekly series. I think it's a great idea, which is probably why they didn't do it.

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