Every Terminator movie since T2 has tried to introduce a new actor as the face of the franchise, but, unsurprisingly, no one has been able to replace Arnold Schwarzenegger. When he was introduced as the villain in the first movie, Schwarzenegger was just an up-and-coming actor making his name in Hollywood. By the time James Cameron helmed the sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Schwarzenegger was the world’s biggest movie star, sitting comfortably at the top of the A-list. His T-800 was reprogrammed to be a hero and solidified his place as the star of the franchise.

But ever since then, the Terminator movies have made futile attempts to replace Schwarzenegger and pᴀss the baton to a new headlining star. Around the time of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Schwarzenegger’s political career cast doubt on his future with the franchise. In that movie and every one that followed, the filmmakers introduced a new character who could inherit the role of franchise star from Schwarzenegger — in almost all cases, there were plans for soft reboots and full trilogies with these actors — but, for one reason or another, they all failed to successfully replace the Austrian Oak.

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Nick Stahl

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines skipped ahead a decade from the events of T2. Sarah Connor was killed off-screen by a terminal illness and her now-grownup son John is living off the grid, paranoid that he’s still being hunted by Skynet’s footsoldiers from the future, despite having destroyed Cyberdyne Systems. Nick Stahl replaced Edward Furlong in the role of John as he reteamed with a T-800 and embarked on another action-packed adventure to shut down Skynet. Terminator 3 ended with the revelation that the rise of Skynet and the nuclear holocaust are inevitable.

The ending of Terminator 3 set up a new series of films that would follow Stahl’s John into the post-apocalyptic future as he ᴀssembled the resistance force and launched a war against the machines. Terminator 3 received generally positive reviews from critics and made a decent haul at the box office, but it wasn’t a resounding hit in the way that T2 was, and audiences didn’t really take to Stahl’s John. If Terminator 3 had been a bigger hit, Stahl would’ve become the new face of the franchise. But he lacked Furlong’s charisma and Schwarzenegger’s screen presence.

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Christian Bale

Warner Bros. went through with its plan to follow up Terminator 3 with a fourth movie set during the futuristic war between the machines and the human resistance. But since Terminator 3 wasn’t a huge hit, Terminator Salvation was retooled as a soft reboot instead. Stahl was replaced by Christian Bale, who played an older, more grizzled John as the leader of the resistance. If Salvation had been a bigger hit, Bale would’ve replaced Schwarzenegger as the face of the franchise — especially since he was still playing Batman at the time, meaning his star power was at an all-time high.

But Terminator Salvation received mixed-to-negative reviews. While Bale’s performance was praised, the movie’s screenplay was criticized for a very generic story recycling tropes from other sci-fi thrillers and post-apocalyptic movies, and McG’s mechanical direction was criticized for lacking the heart of the previous films. It didn’t help that Bale’s John isn’t really the focus of the movie; he’s shown as a mythical figure through the eyes of Marcus, a human-terminator hybrid played by Sam Worthington, so the audience didn’t really have a chance to connect with him.

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Emilia Clarke

The next attempt to revitalize the Terminator franchise, Terminator Genisys, introduced two possible replacements for Schwarzenegger: Emilia Clarke, at the height of Game of Thrones’ popularity, was cast as Sarah Connor, and Jai Courtney, who was getting a big push as an action star after playing John McClane’s son, was cast as Kyle Reese. Terminator Genisys remixes the Terminator timeline, offering a greatest-hits montage of classic Terminator moments while also making radical changes, like giving Skynet a human body and revealing that Sarah was raised by a benevolent T-800 nicknamed “Pops.”

While Courtney has never really had the chops to be an action star, Clarke could’ve made for a really great Sarah. Unfortunately, Terminator Genisys was widely panned by critics for its nonsensical storytelling and baffling retcons. The reviews for Terminator 3 and Salvation look like universal praise compared to Genisys. It also didn’t help that Schwarzenegger came back for this one and stole the show, so it was hard to take any of his replacements seriously.

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Mackenzie Davis

After the abysmal failure of Terminator Genisys, Cameron himself returned to the franchise to co-write the story for yet another soft reboot, Terminator: Dark Fate. Dark Fate ignores all the movies that came after T2 and presupposes that the destruction of Cyberdyne did, indeed, prevent the rise of Skynet. But it doesn’t really matter, because a different evil A.I. army called Legion just rose up in its place. Dark Fate brought back Schwarzenegger as a Terminator named Carl and Linda Hamilton as an older, even more badᴀss Sarah.

Once again, Dark Fate introduced some new stars to take the baton from Schwarzenegger: Natalia Reyes as future resistance leader Dani Ramos and Mackenzie Davis as super soldier Grace. As the superpowered protector, Davis was clearly supposed to be the new Schwarzenegger. Davis was awesome in this role, but Dark Fate was another critical and commercial disappointment — and another sign that no one can replace Schwarzenegger as the face of the Terminator franchise.