Corona | Coming Attractions

Estimated box office ticket receipts for the long Memorial Day weekend are in and Terminator Salvation comes in with a four-day gross of $43 million dollars. That's enough to give the film second place standing behind Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian's opening take of $53.5 million dollars.

So with mixed-to-negative reviews for Terminator Salvation and a less-than-hoped for opening weekend, where did the movie go wrong? CHUD's Devin Faraci offers his conclusions in a post-mortem analysis. Faraci went to the set of the film and was also one of the online reporters that broke a major story spoiler about the film early in its production so he's very familiar with the material. Find out what combination of factors may have muddled up Terminator Salvation in the CHUD exclusive.

Terminator Salvation earned $13.37 million dollars in its first day of release. That figure comes from the 3,480 screens the film is playing at and includes the $3 million dollars worth of ticket sales from midnight 5/21 screenings. Variety predicts that the movie should gross at least $60 million by the end of the long weekend.

And now that the movie is playing in theaters there is a new article on Popular Mechanics website that explains how one of the movie's biggest special effects and likely its biggest surprise was created:

Find out how Legacy Effects pulled off the FX but beware of big spoilers

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Midnight screenings of Terminator Salvation will take place one minute after the stroke of midnight tonight allowing the summer blockbuster an early head start into the Memorial Day long weekend.

The Pizza Hut Terminator Salvation site has been updated with a new six-minute video showing Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) and Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) battling the Harvester at the desert gas station seen in the movie's trailers. The video is split into two segments, with the first half showing the scene from the movie followed by a featurette showing us a behind-the-scene look at the making of how the gas station exploded.

While the video is currently showing first at the Pizza Hut site we don't know how long it will be running there, so we've embedded the clip below.

A brand new four-minute extended trailer for the movie has hit. While there aren't any new spoilers contained in the material the new trailer does a better job of connecting the dots for how T4's story flows, so you may want to skip watching it if you feel you're pushing the limits of your spoiler threshold already.

Warner Bros. has pushed back the Mexican opening of Terminator Salvation from June 5 to July 31, hoping that the seven additional weeks will prove to be enough for the current outbreak of swine flu to have dispersed. T4 is the latest big summer film to have its Mexican opening shifted back after X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Star Trek. Sony has also delayed the Mexican release of Angels & Demons one month.

According to a story that appeared in yesterday's edition of Variety, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has given his approval for his image to appear in the final cut of Terminator Salvation. Variety explains that a body-cast mold that Schwarzenegger made for the original Terminator film was used by the Terminator Salvation production as " the basis for a digital-effects version of his famous character." We know that Roland Kickinger is playing the Arnold T-800 in Salvation and it's conceivable that the mold was used, in conjunction with CG effects, to make Kickinger look more like the way Schwarznegger did back in 1984. The big news is that Schwarzenegger has looked at the end result and authorized his digital self to make the final cut of the movie.

Variety is reporting that Moritz Borman's lawsuit against Halcyon Company's Victor Kubicek and Derek Anderson has been settled out-of-court. Deals of the arrangement were not given in the press statement that the trio released. Borman brought the lawsuit against Halcyon and its two executives back in March, asking for $160 million dollars in damages and alleging that the duo swindled him out of $2.5 million dollars he was to be paid as a producer and wrestled control of the production from out of Borman's hands.

"We are glad to have these issues behind us so we can focus on working with our filmmakers and our studio partners at Warner Bros and Sony Pictures to give Terminator fans the next amazing installment in this enduring series of film," read the group's statement in part.

In an interview with MTV Movies Blog, McG revealed that the ending of Terminator Salvation may be controversial for audiences. "The ending is indeed elliptical," McG told the site. "And it challenges the audience. It’s not a happy little bow of an ending at all. The ending is tough and requires reflection, and in some degrees it bifurcates the audience. You walk back to the car and one person thinks it means this, and the other person thinks it means that."

Have you ever wanted to see what your mug would look like with parts of a T-800 metal skull sticking out from under your flesh? Now you can with TerminateYourself.com, a promotional website that offers you the chance to upload a photo of yourself and then have it Terminated in appearance. It's pretty easy to do and once you've done it, now you have a new photo to use as your icon on Facebook or Twitter.

Pizza Hut is doing a product tie-in for Terminator Salvation and a reader for Ain't It Cool News caught it at the bottom of the page: a PG-13 rating for the movie. If Terminator Salvation has indeed landed a PG-13, the Motion Picture Association of America hasn't released that news yet on their website.

Fast Company blew a spoiler in their video article about Terminator Salvation but it's now been removed from the site at the request of Warner Bros. However, since the cat is out of the bag we'll tell you what the site revealed but since we're cool cats and all that, we're hiding it behind our spoiler curtain.

Wired magazine has transcribed an interview with Terminator creator James Cameron where he discusses his thoughts on the origin, impact and future of his Terminator mythology. In the short piece Cameron reveals that he doesn't think that the future depicted in his two films, that of a near future where humanity is fighting for its continued existence against thinking machines, will come to pass. Here is the portion of his talk where he gets down to Terminator Salvation:

"I kind of turned my back on the Terminator world when there was early talk about a third film. I'd evolved beyond it. I don't regret that, but I have to live with the consequence, which is that I keep seeing it resurrected. I'm not involved in Terminator Salvation. I've never read the script. I'm sure I'll be paying 10 bucks to see it like everybody else."

IGN has debuted another new Terminator Salvation one-sheet, this one showing off the skull of a T-800 in the clutched fist of a human. Human beings love the new poster, Terminators hate it. See it.

A source has told the CHUD website that Linda Hamilton has recorded a voice-over for Terminator Salvation and that it will be heard at the beginning of the film. CHUD's source knows this because they heard Hamilton's narration for themselves, and they gave a brief description of the kind of mood her words evoke in their report.