ACTIVATING ARNOLD
>> WRITING EXCLUSIVELY FOR EMPIRE. THE TERMINATOR PRODUCER GALE ANNE HURD RECALLS HOW SHE HAD A FRONT-ROW SEAT FOR THE MAKING OF A MEGASTAR
40 YEARS OF THE TERMINATOR
IF THE TERMINATOR
hadn’t been a success, I truly believe there would have been no second movie for Jim Cameron and me. I don’t mean a second Terminator movie. I mean any movie. Jim had directed a film previously, and I’d produced one for Roger Corman, but those were both jobs for hire. So if The Terminator hadn’t worked, who knows what we’d be doing now? I doubt we would have had the same careers.
Yet it was never obvious to us that it would become such a success. Even after we’d finished production on The Terminator, I remember the head of marketing at Orion Pictures telling me, “This is a down and dirty exploitation film. We’re embarrassed to release it. We don’t want to screen it for critics, and it’ll be out of theatres by the second weekend.”
Of course, that didn’t happen. The reason I’m writing this today is because the audience, God bless them, loved the film. They told their friends to go see it. Even with no marketing support, the box office went up by five per cent in the second weekend. People praised it as an absolutely intense rollercoaster ride from beginning to end. So much so, they had to see it more than once. I’ve heard from people who say they’ve seen the film over 150 times! I don’t think I’ve seen it that many times. It blew our minds.