Indeed, Cameron himself would rack up more than that with True Lies, double it with Titanic and spunk half that on carob bars while making Avatar.

With a budget of around $100 million, Terminator 2 seems almost modest next to today’s cash-snorting productions. Not content with pinning the success of an entire production on experimental, largely unproven technology, though, Cameron also had to wrestle the rights away from a difficult production company (Hemdale) and an ex-wife (Gale Anne Hurd), convincing Carolco to dole out $5 million apiece. It was, as Fox’s Tom Sherak once bemoaned, as if the entire waterlogged debacle had been just a test reel just for Terminator 2. The ‘pseudopod’ sequence in Cameron’s previous film had taken nine months, lasted 75 seconds and proved that technology was almost catching up with the filmmaker’s fevered imagination. But if T2’s Swiss-army-foe had become the posterbot for CGI, it owed its very existence to a dripping tentacle in 1989’s The Abyss.

Muren’s shape-shifting wizardry triggered a surge in imitators, everything from Star Trek to Michael Jackson hitching their cart to ILM’s morphing bandwagon.

Terminator 2 full movie 1991