Less than a week after Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment entered early talks with Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) to helm Twisters, the studios have announced a release date for the Twister sequel. Twisters will be released in theaters on July 19, 2024, just a week before Marvel’s Thunderbolts movie.
The Twister sequel has been penned by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), and it’s said that Amblin’s Steven Spielberg “flipped” for the script and the production was fast-tracked. The hope is to bring back Helen Hunt as Dr. Jo Harding. It will focus on the daughter she had with Bill Paxton’s character, who has caught the same “storm-chasing bug” that her parents did. The original Twister was directed by Jan de Bont and written by Micahel Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin. The movie followed “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.”
While Twisters will be a sequel to the original film, Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment were originally developing a reboot of the movie. The studios had been in talks with Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski to helm the project, but he later dropped out in favour of his Formula One racing movie starring Brad Pitt. New Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung has a personal connection with destructive storms. As a child, he grew up on a farm in rural Arkansas and had plenty of experience taking cover in storm cellars when tornadoes would pass through. This personal connection was a hit with studio executives, and he became the top choice for the gig. The Twisters release date will find the sequel hitting theaters close to thirty years after the release of the original film, which grossed nearly $500 million worldwide and was the second-highest-grossing film of the year. Sadly, several members of the original cast are no longer with us, notably Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman.