A follow-up to the 1996 disaster film Twister (watch it HERE) has been in and out of development for over twenty-five years. A few months ago, it was announced that one is finally going to go into production, with Minari director Lee Isaac Chung at the helm and Daisy Edgar-Jones of Fresh and Where the Crawdads Sing in the lead. And while that film, titled Twisters, heads toward its July 19, 2024 release date, Insider got some information on the demise of the Twister 2 that Twister star Helen Hunt was recently developing with Grammy and Tony winner Daveed Diggs and his Blindspotting co-writer Rafael Casal.
Diggs told Insider, “I’m not going to get into it, mostly because I’m probably going to misremember things. But all I’ll say is there was an opportunity where we were talking about that, and it didn’t happen, and the reasons that it didn’t happen are potentially shady. But shady in the way that we know the industry is shady.“
This seems to go along with comments Hunt has made previously. During an appearance on Watch What Happens Live back in 2021, Hunt revealed, “I tried to get it made. With Daveed and Rafael and me writing it, and all Black and brown storm chasers, and they wouldn’t do it. I was going to direct it… We could barely get a meeting, and this is in June of 2020 when it was all about diversity. It would have been so cool. … There was a (Historically Black College and University) where we wanted it to take place, and a rocket science club. In this one, they shoot the rockets into the tornado. It was going to be so cool.“
Directed by Jan de Bont from a screenplay by Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin, the first Twister told the following story: Bill and Jo Harding, advanced storm chasers on the brink of divorce, must join together to create an advanced weather alert system by putting themselves in the cross-hairs of extremely violent tornadoes.
The screenplay Mark L. Smith has written for Twisters centers on a former storm chaser who works a desk job after surviving a disastrous tornado encounter. However, she will be forced back out onto the field.
Which sounds more interesting to you? The Twisters we’re getting, or the Twister 2 we would have gotten from Helen Hunt? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
