Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is a 2003 science fiction action film, the third installment in the Terminator franchise and a sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). It was directed by Jonathan Mostow and stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nick Stahl, Claire Danes, and Kristanna Loken. In its plot, the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet sends a T-X (Loken)—a highly advanced Terminator—back in time to ensure the rise of machines by killing top members of the future human resistance as John Connor's (Stahl) location is unknown. The resistance sends back a reprogrammed T-850 (Schwarzenegger) to protect John and his future wife, Kate Brewster (Danes).

While Terminator creator James Cameron was interested in directing the third film, he ultimately had no involvement with Terminator 3. Andrew G. Vajna and Mario Kassar, who had produced Terminator 2: Judgment Day through their company Carolco Pictures, obtained the rights for the franchise through both Carolco's liquidation auction and negotiations with producer Gale Ann Hurd. In 1999, Tedi Sarafian was hired to write the first draft of the script. Mostow joined the project as director in 2001, and he brought on John Brancato and Michael Ferris to rewrite Sarafian's script. The $187 million budget included a $5 million salary for Mostow and a record $30 million salary for Schwarzenegger. Filming took place in California from April to September 2002. Industrial Light & Magic and Stan Winston created the special effects, as they did for the previous film.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines premiered at the Mann Village Theater in Westwood, Los Angeles, on June 30, 2003, and was released on July 2, 2003, by Warner Bros. Pictures in North America. The film was rolled out overseas throughout the next few months, with Columbia Pictures overseeing the bulk of the international distribution. It received generally positive reviews and earned $433.4 million worldwide, finishing its theatrical run as the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2003. Coincidentally, the film was used to mark Schwarzenegger's formal entry into politics, having been speculated to be a vehicle for his 2003 gubernatorial run. A sequel, Terminator Salvation, was released in 2009.

Ten years after destroying Cyberdyne Systems, John Connor has been living as a nomad following the death of his mother, Sarah Connor, and fears that the malevolent artificial intelligence Skynet is still hunting him despite a war between humans and machines not happening in 1997, as foretold.

Unable to locate John in the past, Skynet sends the T-X, an advanced Terminator with shapeshifting liquid metal covering a virtually impervious metal endoskeleton, back in time to John's present in Los Angeles, to kill his future allies in the Resistance, including John's future wife, Kate Brewster. In response, the Resistance sends back a reprogrammed T-850 Terminator to protect John and Kate.

After killing other targets, the T-X locates the pair at an animal hospital where Kate works. John becomes the T-X's primary target, but the Terminator helps him and Kate escape, taking them to a mausoleum where John's mother, Sarah, is supposedly interred. Inside her coffin, they find a weapons cache left at Sarah's request in case Judgment Day was not averted and the Terminators returned. They escape an armed battle with the police and fend off the pursuing T-X.

The Terminator reveals that John and Sarah's actions only delayed Judgment Day and that Skynet's attack will occur that day; the Terminator intends to drive John and Kate to Mexico to escape the fallout when Skynet begins its nuclear attack. John orders the Terminator to take him and Kate to see her father, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Robert Brewster. The Terminator refuses because he can't jeopardize his mission; however, when Kate demands to see her father, the Terminator obeys. The pair learns that the Terminator originally killed John in 2032 due to his emotional attachment to the model, before Kate captured and reprogrammed the Terminator and sent it back in time.

Meanwhile, General Brewster is supervising the development of Skynet for Cyber Research Systems (CRS), which also develops autonomous weapons. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pressures him to activate Skynet to stop an anomalous computer virus from invading servers worldwide. General Brewster fails to discover that the virus was Skynet becoming sentient, and John and Kate arrive too late to stop him from activating it. The T-X fatally injures General Brewster and controls the CRS weaponized T-1 and HK drones, which kill the employees. Before he dies, the general gives Kate and John the location of what John believes is Skynet's system core. The pair head for the tarmac to take General Brewster's single-engine plane to Crystal Peak, a facility built inside the Sierra Nevada.