McG Reveals “Terminator Salvation” Alternate Ending

“We would have been number one if they’d listened to me, Marcus!” 

No, we don’t mean the alternate ending where the franchise relaunch (a word which is rapidly overtaking the overplayed “reboot”) does blockbuster business at the box office. We mean the much darker ending that McG and Christian Bale both supported, as they discuss in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

Spoilers below, so read on with caution if you haven’t seen the movie yet but plan to and like to be surprised (and if you didn’t see it yet, but plan to, Warner Brothers is crying, “Why didn’t you go this weekend?!! Don’t you know how important opening weekend numbers are?!! Are you deliberately trying to hurt us?”). But for a start, let’s just say that this ending would have made a sequel difficult.

 Here’s what McG had to say:

“Connor dies, okay? He’s dead. And Marcus offers his physical body, so Connor’s exterior is put on top of his machine body. It looks like Connor, but it’s really Marcus underneath. And all of the characters we care about (Kyle Reese, Connor’s wife Kate, etc.) are brought into the room to see him and they think it’s Connor. And Connor gets up and then there’s a small flicker of red in his eyes and he shoots Kate, he shoots Kyle, he shoots everybody in the room. Fade to black. End of movie. Skynet wins. F— you!

“It’s the most nihilistic thing of all time. And Christian went f—ing crazy, of course. He was insistent that it be done that way! He wanted the bad guys to win! Can you imagine the oxygen going out of the theater?! What just happened! It would piss you off! But maybe two years from now, you’d think it was ballsy. But in the end, it just felt like too much of a bummer.”

He pauses, thinking about the alternate ending that wasn’t. “Maybe we blew it.”

McG tells EW that the studio had signed off on this original bleak ending. “But something about it didn’t smell right to him in the end. How could a movie with a reported budget of $200 million and a possible future of sequels possibly end that way?”

Bale backs up McG on this issue. Asked if he was disappointed they didn’t go with the dark ending, Bale said:

I’m not the director,” says Bale. “There came to be a different option that almost everyone, except myself, felt was the better way to go. I took a bit of convincing, but you know, at the end of the day, you need a director to make that call.”

But doesn’t he think that his Salvation would have been a depressing bummer, not to mention suicide at the box office?

“Done the way I saw it? No. But am I disappointed with this one? No.”

Well, what’s he going to say? “Yeah, I’m pissed, they made a mistake, it would have been brilliant!”

I don’t know if the dark ending would have helped or hurt the box office. It probably wouldn’t have made an opening weekend difference, but might have hurt its already shaky long-term prospects. It’s summer, and people don’t like to see the heroes of their summer blockbusters die. Save that for Oscar season, auteurs.