Relics from a deleted timeline: the economics of Terminator Genisys

Prometheus by the Bay: Hollywood and tech capitalism in Silicon Valley

“…Reflecting transformations in geopolitics since the end of the Cold War, Cyberdyne, its evil megacorporation that unleashes a robot‐led apocalypse, is no longer simply yoked to the military‐industrial complex but is primarily a consumer corporation, dedicated both to protecting the United States from nuclear weapons and to enabling Americans to unify their data storage siloes. Cyberdyne's titular operating system promises to bring its 1 billion users individual, singular online identities, always available, always online, and always accessible by the military‐industrial complex, not to mention Homeland Security (Wegner, 2017, pp. 121–122).…”

“…All make use of the San Francisco skyline in order to locate the action in a place that sits firmly in the spectator's sense of geographical reality. For example, whereas previous films in the Terminator franchise locate their core action in Los Angeles, Genisys relocates Cyberdyne's headquarters and the bulk of the action to the San Francisco peninsula, with the design of its buildings based on the headquarters of Oracle, a consequence of the relationship between the film's producers David and Megan Ellison and their father, Larry, Oracle's Chief Executive Officer (Acuna, 2015; Broxmeyer, 2010, p. 15; Wegner, 2017, p. 115). That the films' villainous corporations are located in the Bay Area both binds the films together and encourages an analysis that emphasizes their relationship with the dominant corporate force in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley.…”