**SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE TERMINATOR: GENISYS TRAILERS** If you’re one of the people who has managed to go to a movie theater in the past couple of months and not see a trailer for "Terminator Genisys," congratulations, because you’re one of the few that hasn’t had the movie spoiled. There have been many complaints in the run up to the release of the movie about Paramount‘s campaign that has given away some key character and plot twists, and director Alan Taylor wants to make it clear that he wasn’t intending audiences to know some of this stuff before they sat down with a tub of popcorn.
"I certainly directed those scenes with the intention that no one would know," Taylor told Uproxx. "One of my favorite moments — and I think Jason Clarke did a great job with it — is when [John Connor] walks into the hospital in 2017 and everything from there until the [villainous] turn, you’re supposed to think, ‘Oh man, this is great.’ "
However, it seems the studio wasn’t confident in audiences to discover those kinds of twists themselves. "I know there was kind of a challenging calculus going on in the heads of those who market this thing to decide that this was the right thing to do," the director shared about the thinking behind the advertising. "I think they felt like they had to send a strong message to a very wary audience that there was something new — that this was going to new territory. They were concerned that people were misperceiving this as kind of a reboot, and none of us wanted to reboot two perfect movies by James Cameron. I think they felt they had to do something game-changing in how the film was being perceived."
I wouldn’t necessarily call the marketing "game-changing" so much as spoon-feeding an audience into knowing exactly what they’re going to get. But at other times, the studio curiously let other people run with their material, which explains what happened with those poorly received first look images that debuted in Entertainment Weekly last fall.
READ MORE: Watch: ‘Terminator Genisys’ Parody Trailer Explores The Many Paradoxes Of The Franchise
"I hope everybody understands that was EW doing what it was going to do. I was surprised they went off and did that and we didn’t see it until it was on the cover and we thought, ‘What the…?’ " Taylor said.
He admits he had "a few unpleasant conversations" about the marketing of "Terminator Genisys," but it seems he’s come to accept how it all played out in the end. The film opens on July 1st. Check out a new TV spot below.
The whole campaign reeks of desperation. Probably can\’t be helped though if the film is as bad as it looks. Terminator Salvation marketing was way better IMO.