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Why do you think it is impossible to create good Terminator and Predator sequels past part 2 (I stand firm that predator 2 is underappreciated)
With regards to Terminator, every time travel story ultimately has to take a firm philosophical position on whether the past is mutable or not. The original The Terminator was an enclosed, self-contained story which took the stance that the past was immutable: the ending reveals the entire story to have been a stable time loop. Terminator 2 set out to surprise audiences at every turn (oh my God, Arnie is the good guy this time!) which extended all the way to its ending and its reveal that, in stark contrast to the original movie, the past is mutable. The film ends on a note of optimistic uncertainty, with the protagonists' actions appearing to have averted the future apocalypse for good. This was made even more explicit in the original scripted ending which depicts Sarah, John and Sarah's grandchildren in an idyllic future Los Angeles, which was thankfully cut for being too sappy, on-the-nose and tonally dissonant with the rest of the film. (James Cameron has a recurrent problem with indulging his inner Spielberg and wanting to end his films on a corny sentimental note, only for cooler heads to prevail in the editing suite and instead opting for something more ambiguous and restrained.)
Not having seen any of the sequels following the first two, all my knowledge of them is secondhand, but my understanding is that every subsequent sequel has set out to follow the example set by Terminator 2 and have its philosophical attitude to the mutability of the past directly contradict the attitude espoused by the previous film. This leads to an interminable game of "the past is immutable – no it isn't – yes it is — no it isn't – is – isn't". With a binary question, the number of times you can surprise audiences by changing the answer is exactly one. When Terminator 3 revealed that Judgement Day was still going to happen, audiences didn't find this exactly as shocking as Terminator 2's implication that Judgement Day could be decisively averted; rather, it registered as a regression to the original film's status quo. In spite of Cameron's strenuous efforts to reinvent the entire franchise from the ground up with Terminator 2, by the end of Terminator 3 the franchise was back almost exactly where it started. Eventually audiences just got sick of being jerked around and lost interest: no permanence, no stakes.
Another reason might be a bit more mundane. The Terminator made the most of its limited budget, but some of its visual effects looked pretty ropey even at the time. Half of the appeal of Terminator 2 was getting to see a story very similar to the original (indeed, the plot beats and structure are so similar that in some ways it's more like a remake than a sequel), but with an expanded budget and improved VFX wizardry. The visual effects of Terminator 2 were mind-blowing on release and have aged incredibly well. But you quickly run into the law of diminishing returns: while I'm sure the visual effects in the subsequent sequels were marginally superior to those of Terminator 2, they could never hope to match the quantum-leap sensation of the transition from The Terminator to Terminator 2. "Come see the Terminator, with visual effects that will blow your mind" is an easy sell, unlike "come see the Terminator, with visual effects very slightly improved over previous Terminator films".
See also the Matrix Trilogy.
They did their damndest to keep the visuals impressive and upping the ante thanks to unlimited budget. And sort of succeeded but also sucked the actual heart and soul out in the process.
Yes, hence the joke about how there weren't any Matrix sequels.
On the other hand, there was a very nice prequel called "The Second Renaissance"; 20 minutes of animated goodness exploring the backstory to the movie's setting. The allusion to "Saigon Execution" goes hard.
I watched The Animatrix when it came out on VHS (Christ, VHS? I wonder how many of the users on this board even know what I'm talking about), and remember finding most of the shorts quite entertaining and stylistically distinct.
Looking it up now, it turns out the protagonist in one of the shorts was literally named "Cis" lol? Let no one say the Wachowskis' insistence that The Matrix was always intended as a trans metaphor is just a retcon: it was staring us in the face right since the beginning.
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