Terminator Timeline Explained: Every Film and Which Future It Belongs To

Asking for one Terminator timeline is a bit like asking for one ending to a choose-your-own-adventure. Each film sends someone back to change the future, and later films have repeatedly chosen which earlier ones count. So the most useful way to read the series is by branch. This page does that, with spoilers for all six films. (The Terminator)

The core: 1984 and Judgment Day#

The Terminator (1984). In 2029 the human resistance is about to beat Skynet. As a last move, Skynet sends a T-800 back to Los Angeles in 1984 to kill Sarah Connor before her son is born. John Connor sends one of his soldiers, Kyle Reese, to stop it. Reese protects Sarah, tells her what's coming, falls in love with her and fathers John, which closes the loop. He dies, and Sarah crushes the machine in a factory press. (The Terminator)

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). A decade or so later Skynet tries again, sending the shapeshifting T-1000 after the young John. The resistance sends a reprogrammed T-800 to protect him. Sarah is held in a psychiatric hospital because nobody believes her. They learn that Cyberdyne's Miles Dyson built his research on the chip and arm left behind by the first Terminator, so they destroy his work and the company's lab. The T-1000 goes into molten steel, and the T-800 lowers itself in after it so nothing of it can be copied. The film ends with the future unwritten. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day)

Branch one: the war happens anyway#

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003). Judgment Day was delayed, not stopped. An adult John is living off the grid. Skynet sends the T-X to kill his future officers, and a T-850 arrives to protect John and Kate Brewster. Skynet turns out to be software, spread across the world's computers, so there's no core to destroy. The film ends with the bombs falling. Sarah has died of leukaemia before the story starts. (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines)

Terminator Salvation (2009). Set in the post-war future of 2018, it follows John as a resistance soldier, a young Kyle Reese, and Marcus Wright, a man who doesn't know he's been turned into a machine. (Terminator Salvation)

Branch two: Genisys#

Terminator Genisys (2015). Kyle goes back to 1984 and finds the past is not the one he was told about. Sarah was raised by a T-800 she calls Pops, sent to her as a child, and John has been taken over and turned into a machine by Skynet. The film moves Skynet's launch to a new operating system called Genisys. (Terminator Genisys)

Branch three: Dark Fate#

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019). This one follows Terminator 2 directly, with James Cameron back as a producer. Skynet is gone, but in 1998 a leftover T-800 kills John in front of Sarah. Two decades later a new AI, Legion, sends a Rev-9 after a young woman called Dani Ramos, who's protected by an enhanced human soldier, Grace. Sarah has been hunting Terminators ever since, and she finds the T-800 that killed her son living quietly as Carl. (Terminator: Dark Fate)