It may be one of the reasons why the film did better overseas, because by then the cat was out of the bag.” Jonathan Mostow told Vulture But looking back, I feel like had we teased a little more that there was a surprise coming, it might’ve actually been better for the box office domestically. We scheduled it right before the release, and the publicity people were really good about getting all the journalists to have no spoilers, hold the reviews, and everything else. and Sony, “We really want to keep this a secret.” So we scheduled the premiere for just like two nights before.

I also wanted that to be a surprise for the audience. Had that been a typical studio film, we never would have been able to do a dark ending like that. From a filmmaker standpoint, to be doing a $200 million movie without the studio nervously looking over your shoulder was amazing. And then, once I was done with the movie, we invited them to come to a screening and we showed the movie, and that was it. So, they got to read it ahead of time when deciding whether or not they wanted to co-finance the movie. It had to be kept in a safe, and no one else was allowed to read it. In fact, only one person at Warner and one person at Sony could have a copy of the script. What that means is, yes, it was distributed by a studio - Warner Brothers domestically, Sony in most of the foreign territories - but those studios really weren’t involved in the making of the movie. Actually, all but one of my films have been independently financed films. “What enabled us to do the very dark ending was that Terminator 3 was an independent film. Director Jonathan Mostow spoke to Vulture about the dark ending of Terminator 3:

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