Joss Whedon (who was my master but is now merely someone with undue and unhealthy influence over me because of the chronic lameness of Dollhouse, which I still watch because of said influence) has somewhat jokingly offered to buy the Terminator franchise. One of his ideas:
1) Terminator… of the Rings! Yeah, what if he time-travelled TOO far… back to when there was dragons and wizards? (I think it was the Dark Ages.) Hasta La Vista, Boramir! Cool, huh? “Now you gonna be Gandalf the Red!” RRRRIP! But then he totally helps, because he’s a cyborg and he doesn’t give a s#&% about the ring — it has no power over him! And he can carry it AND Frodo AND Sam AND f@%& up some orcs while he’s doing it. This stuff just comes to me. I mean it. (I will also offer $10,000 for the Lord of the Rings franchise).
I like it, but he skipped right past some more obvious ones.
Sleepless in Seatle: The Re-Rise of the Machines: Tom Hanks’ kid turns out to be John Connor’s liver donor in the future, so Skynet sends a Terminator back to hunt him down. His girlfriend Jessica livens up their horror-filled escape by constantly using verbal short hand like TMI (Too much information), RLH (Run like hell!), YTISYIWOSYD (you’re too important, save yourself! I will only slow you down!), and SFTGST! (Shoot for the gas storage tanks!).
Alien versus Predator versus Terminator: This one speaks for itself.
Milk II: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: The Terminator goes back to late 1970s San Francisco because he’s decided he can no longer live a lie. When a homophobic bigot maitre’ d refuses to seat his party at the front of a restaurant, he shoots him in the face with a shotgun. Sean Penn exclaims, “Oh, no you didn’t!”
Star Trek 3.0: We’re Just Collecting Checks Now. Spock manages to mess up with the finicky red matter one more time. It all ends when the Terminator becomes one of Harry Mudd’s (played by Oliver Platt) sex robots.
Update: More, from a reader:
You left out a few:
Titanic Terminator: John Connor’s great-great-grandpa was on the Titanic. The ship only struck a glancing blow on the iceberg and could have made New York easily, but for a battle in the hold where the Terminator blew out three watertight compartments. Of course, the end where the Titanic is split in two was a wonkish attempt to defeat the cyborg.
Hallo-nator: John Connor’s grandma is a mid-western housewife. On Halloween, Michael Myers decides to off the big stiff in black leather to the sound of creepy back music. He gets a big surprise.
Jurassic Terminator: John Connor is being pursued by the the wierd Irish Terminatrix but Summer Glau rigs another time travel escape – this one to the Jurassic epoch. The good Terminators built a technological colony in the Permian era and have caches of weapons and technology scattered across the world and time. Summer Glau and Connor have to make it to the nearest cache and return to the future – chased by velociraptors and the Irish Terminatrix (R for nudity)