When it came out in 1996, Twister was a game-changer — a blockbuster that favored special effects-heavy spectacle over story, character development, even its impressive cast of over-qualified thespians. The future director of Tár is even in it! What it didn’t do was inspire sequels, because franchises weren’t yet a staple of Hollywood thinking. But now, over a quarter of a century later, a follow-up is belatedly in the offing, and it has an incredible no-brainer of a title.
As per Deadline, Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment are teaming up for another round of storm chasing action. There’s a new script by The Revenant’s Mark L. Smith, which is apparently so good that Amblin’s own Steven Spielberg flipped over it, to the point that it’s being fast-tracked.
Directors’ names are already being bandied about. Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski has already dropped out of the production. They’re already meeting with such people as Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vaserhelyi, of the terrifying mountaineering doc Free Solo, and Travis Knight, of the Laika stop-motion films Missing Link and Kubo and the Two Strings, as well as Bumblebee.
Oh, and the title, at least for now: It’s Twisters.
There’s an old, possibly apocryphal story about James Cameron’s pitch for Aliens, the sequel to 1979’s Alien. As the tale goes, Cameron simply walked up to a whiteboard, wrote “Alien,” then added an “s.” It’s big if true, but perhaps having more than one twister isn’t all that ridiculous. After all, this is an age of big, bats*it weather that destroys homes and lives, thanks in part to how badly humanity is screwing up the planet.
In the meantime, those wishing to catch up on Twister — which also features [deep breath] the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cary Elwes, Lois Smith, Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, Anthony Rapp, to say nothing of Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt and Jami Gertz — can do so on Hulu.
(Via Deadline)
