Terminator is an American media franchise created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd.

Within the film, a new formidable threat surfaces in the form of Legion, an artificial intelligence surpassing Skynet’s capabilities. Legion poses an existential danger to humanity, aiming to eliminate it entirely. Sarah Connor must lead a coalition of heroes in a desperate struggle against Legion before it achieves its goal of exterminating all of humanity.

By 2010, the franchise had generated $3 billion in revenue. The film franchise is considered to be of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction.

In the franchise, Judgment Day (a reference to the biblical Day of Judgment) is the date on which Skynet becomes self-aware and its creators panic and attempt to deactivate the network. As a result, Skynet perceives humanity as a threat and chooses to exterminate them. Skynet launches an all-out nuclear attack on Russia in order to provoke a nuclear counter-strike against the United States, knowing this will eliminate its human enemies. Due to time travel and the consequent ability to change the future, several differing dates are given for Judgment Day. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Sarah Connor states that Judgment Day will occur on August 29, 1997. However, this date is delayed following the attack on Cyberdyne Systems in the second film.

Judgment Day has various different dates in different timelines of the subsequent films, as well as the television series, creating a multiverse of temporal phenomena. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) and Terminator Salvation (2009), Judgment Day was postponed to July 2003.[7][8][9] In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008–2009), the attack on Cyberdyne Systems in the second film delayed Judgment Day to April 21, 2011. In Terminator Genisys (2015), the fifth film in the franchise, Judgment Day was postponed to an unspecified day in October 2017, attributed to altered events in both the future and the past. Sarah and Kyle Reese travel through time to the year 2017 and seemingly defeat Skynet, but the system core, contained inside a subterranean blast shelter, survives unknown to them, thus further delaying, rather than preventing, Judgment Day. In Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), the direct sequel to Terminator 2: Judgment Day, a date is not given for the new Judgment Day though it is named as such by Grace. As Grace is a ten–year old in 2020 and shown as a teenager in the post-Judgment Day world in flash-forwards throughout the movie, Judgment Day occurs sometime in the early 2020s in this timeline.