Here is who John Connor's father is in the original Sarah Connor, so that they can fall in love and give birth to him.
At the end of 1984's The Terminator, Sarah is shown pregnant with John, who then appears as a 12-year-old (played by Terminator Genisys turned John, now with the face of Jason Clarke into an evil Terminator, but the critical and box office failure of Genisys made that story apocryphal. The James Cameron-produced Terminator: Dark Fate, directed by Tim Miller, is a continuation of the events of The Terminator and Terminator 2. And yet, despite the various timelines and incarnations of the leader, Kyle Reese remains John Connor's father.
In a classic case of a grandfather paradox, John had to send Kyle back through time to father him (and then die) so that John could exist. In The Terminator, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) arrives in 1984 to protect 19-year-old Sarah Connor (Anton Yelchin.
Terminator Genisys is perhaps the biggest recent factor making fans question who John's father is. In Genisys, Reese (played by Jai Courtney) meets Sarah (Terminator: Dark Fate is ignoring Genisys entirely so the canonical saga is resetting back to the original timeline established by James Cameron's first two films.
The Terminator timeline has become so convoluted that it's easy for fans to be confused about John Connor's parentage. With so many contradicting timelines and the date of Judgment Day continually getting pushed back, which then changes the timeline and future events, the point of the original John-Kyle-Sarah time loop and paradox that enables the Terminator story to exist in the first place can get lost.
Despite some fans speculating about other possibilities, Kyle Reese being John's father is consistent across the Terminator films and also the TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, where Thomas Dekker played a teenage John and Jonathan Jackson played Kyle Reese. Even though The Sarah Connor Chronicles exists in a separate timeline unrelated to the movies, it still adheres to the basic history of Cameron's Terminator and T2 that began with a time-traveling Kyle Reese falling in love with Sarah Connor and becoming John Connor's father.
