Jan de Bont’s storm-chasing action romp Twister is seemingly getting a sequel, with Amblin and Universal on the hunt for a director.
A big-budget sequel to 1996’s Twister is reportedly on the way, with both Amblin and Universal said to be actively looking for a director who can get the production up and running for a spring shoot. It’s going by the name of, yep, Twisters.
Get ready for some serious name-dropping here: Frank Marshall is producing the film, which originally had Top Gun: Maverick director, Joseph Kosinski attached before he departed to make a Brad Pitt-headlined Formula One movie for Apple. In spite of that, Stephen Spielberg reportedly loves the Twisters script, and it was the legendary tastemaker’s excitement that led to the project, which is penned by The Revenant's Mark L Smith, to be fast-tracked into production.
As if that weren’t a who’s who of Hollywood royalty, there are some talented names in line to direct too, if reports are accurate.
Dan Trachtenberg, who wowed with his recent Predator sequel, Prey is one such name, and so is Travis Knight, helmer of the magnificent Kubo And The Two Strings. Knight has some experience of bringing home a CGI-heavy blockbuster in the form of 2018’s Bumblebee, a Transformers film that managed the impressive feat of injecting some humanity back into the franchise.
Naturally, plans are afoot for at least one legacy character to appear, with Helen Hunt likely to reprise her role. Sadly, both Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who both appeared in the original Twister are no longer with us.
The original grossed a whopping $464m, and that was in 1996 money, so you can see exactly what studio executives might be thinking here. Jurassic World: Dominion, another legacy sequel to a 90s action disaster flick has just earned close to a billion dollars at the box office, in spite of tepid responses, so if such films are deemed to be ‘review-proof’ to the tune that they can gross that much money, there’s no surprise it’s been green-lit.
Still, the fact that Spielberg reportedly ‘flipped’ for the script gives us some hope that this might end up being a worthy sequel and one of those wonderful rarities in the vein of Top Gun: Maverick: the pretty much perfect blockbuster. We’ll let you know more on this one as we hear it.
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