‘Terminator’ Producer Says James Cameron Cut Scene After Financiers Forced Him to Cast Their Friends

The Terminator producer Gale Anne Hurd is revealing the key scene that director James Cameron cut from the 1984 film because financiers made him include their friends in it.

The producer-writer took to X (formerly known as Twitter) on Wednesday to share the scene in question, which shows how Cyberdyne Systems, the tech corporation responsible for the development of Skynet, got the computer chip that goes inside Terminators.

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“#TheTerminator financier John Daly’s #HemdaleFilms had an output deal with #OrionPictures but hadn’t yet made a hit (that changed with our film and #Platoon),” Hurd, who was married to Cameron from 1985-89, wrote. “They insisted we use financier friends not actors in this scene, which ruined it for us.”

Hurd added that the financier’s friends were paid as actors because of the Taft–Hartley Act. “I think he insisted they be in the film because the financiers were promised a return on their investment and had yet to receive one,” she said of Daly, who died in 2008. “Daly never believed the film would be a success.”

When a fan asked why Cameron cut the scene since they thought the actors seemed “fine I guess performance wise,” Hurd responded, “Jim (thankfully) was never satisfied with ‘just ok’, even back then!”

The Terminator went on to be a massive success, making way for five sequels and launching the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The film’s star also recently claimed that The Terminator predicted the future of artificial intelligence, which has been a controversial topic in Hollywood. “Today, everyone is frightened of it, of where this is gonna go,” he said at an event in June. “And in this movie, in Terminator, we talk about the machines becoming self-aware and they take over.”

He added, “At that time we (had) scratched the surface of AI, artificial intelligence. Think about that. … Now over the course of decades, it has become a reality. So it’s not any more fantasy or kind of futuristic. It is here today. And so this is the extraordinary writing of Jim Cameron.”

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