Forty-two years ago yesterday, on 26 October 1984, a low-budget Orion picture about a killer robot from 2029 opened in American cinemas, and Arnold Schwarzenegger found the role that would define his career. It is now, apparently, comfort viewing.
That is the conclusion of a data piece by Parrot Analytics, published on TheWrap last week, which says the Terminator films have earned “nearly $300 million in global streaming subscriber revenue” since 2020. That is more than twice the $132 million it credits to the Matrix films, and five times Blade Runner’s $56 million. The original The Terminator has climbed from the 20th to the sixth most in-demand pre-2000 film in the US since 2023, by Parrot’s measure. Terminator 2: Judgment Day has done even better, jumping from 40th to second among classic films worldwide.
Parrot calls this the “anxiety rewatch”, and dates the steep part of the curve to early 2023, which is when ChatGPT arrived and every news programme started asking whether the machines were coming for our jobs, our elections or our nuclear codes. The theory is that audiences are “retreating to cinema’s classic cautionary tales to process” the headlines about AGI risk and deepfakes.
A few caveats before anyone books Sarah Connor for Newsnight. Parrot’s figures are modelled estimates of demand and the revenue it brings in, not counts of people pressing play. The piece was written by a Parrot employee for TheWrap’s partner section. And the link between AI news and the Terminator’s revival is a matter of timing, not proof. Plenty of old films have done well on streaming without a moral panic to help them.
Still, the instinct makes sense. If you are worried about artificial intelligence, The Terminator is a reassuring film in one important way: its villain is obvious. Skynet does not write your essays, flatter you, or suggest a nice recipe for leftover chicken. It is a military defence network that decides humanity is the threat and acts accordingly, with a chrome endoskeleton and a pump-action shotgun. You know where you stand, which is usually behind something heavy. Today’s anxieties are fuzzier: jobs quietly automated, pictures that might be fake, chatbots that are a little too agreeable. Cameron’s 1984 nightmare is almost nostalgic by comparison.
The film also wears its age better than its sequels. It was made for about $6.4 million, and it shows in the best way: the night-time Los Angeles, the stop-motion endoskeleton crawling across the factory floor, Brad Fiedel’s clanking score. It is a horror film first, a chase movie second and a time-travel story third, which may be why audiences go back to it rather than to Genisys or Dark Fate. Even its originality came with an asterisk: Harlan Ellison argued it borrowed from his Outer Limits episodes, and Orion settled and added an acknowledgement to later prints (we have been down that particular rabbit hole before).
The real lesson of the “anxiety rewatch”, if there is one, may be that science fiction still does the job it always has. We watch a story about our fears, the heroine survives, the robot gets crushed in a hydraulic press, and we go to bed feeling oddly better. Whether that counts as processing the news or avoiding it is a question best left to the psychologists, or possibly to a chatbot.
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