  Surface termination is known to play an important role in determining the
physical properties of materials. It is crucial to know how surface termination
affects the metal-insulator transition (MIT) of V$_2$O$_3$ films for both
fundamental understanding and its applications. By changing growth parameters,
we achieved a variety of surface terminations in V$_2$O$_3$ films that are
characterized by low energy electron diffraction (LEED) and photoemission
spectroscopy techniques. Depending upon the terminations, our results show MIT
can be partially or fully suppressed near the surface region due to the
different filling of the electrons at the surface and sub-surface layers and
change of screening length compared to the bulk. Across MIT, a strong
redistribution of spectral weight and its transfer from high-to-low binding
energy regime is observed in a wide-energy-scale. Our results show total
spectral weight in the low-energy regime is not conserved across MIT,
indicating a breakdown of `sum rules of spectral weight', a signature of a
strongly correlated system. Such change in spectral weight is possibly linked
to the change in hybridization, lattice volume ({\it i.e.,} effective carrier
density), and spin degree of freedom in the system that happens across MIT. We
find that MIT in this system is strongly correlation-driven where the
electron-electron interactions play a pivotal role. Moreover, our results
provide a better insight in understanding the electronic structure of strongly
correlated systems and highlight the importance of accounting surface effects
during interpretation of the physical property data mainly using surface
sensitive probes, such as surface resistivity.
