Although the Terminator movies still haven’t recast Arnold Schwarzenegger’s original T-800, 2024’s Terminator Zero proved that this could work for the series. The Terminator movies began with 1984’s dark, propulsive action thriller The Terminator. A star vehicle for both its heroine Linda Hamilton and its villain Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Terminator was a lean, brutal chase movie whose time-traveling sci-fi storyline came second to its horror-indebted thrills. As surprising as it may seem now, The Terminator was as much a horror movie as an action-packed sci-fi epic.