Climate change is very much real and we’re constantly feeling its effects even if we’re not paying much attention to it right now due to, uh, more pressing real-world matters. Anyway, with this conversation being relevant once again and other genre fare not performing as well as it used to, it only makes sense that Hollywood is bringing big-budget disaster movies back, and Twisters looks like a decent return to form.
Marketing for this one has been swirling up for a while, but now Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. International are putting the pedal to the metal, as the movie drops on July 19, which is closer than most people realize. While we’re currently looking at Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Twisters and more popcorn flicks should be ruling the proper summer season.
Of course, a return to disaster movies isn’t a surefire hit, no matter how stunning the CG spectacle and real-life locations look, so Universal and Amblin were smart enough to juice the sequel-reboot (no one really knows for sure) up with a star-studded cast that includes Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People), Anthony Ramos (In the Heights), Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick), David Corenswet (James Gunn’s Superman), Kiernan Shipka (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), and Katy O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding), among others.
If you’re a regular moviegoer and/or TV enjoyer, most of these names will ring a bell. But the highlights here for most people might be Powell, who’s been enjoying a killer streak of success and mainstream buzz following the Top Gun sequel with movies like Anyone But You and Richard Linklater’s upcoming Hit Man, and Corenswet, who is barely in the previews released so far, but currently is one of the hottest names of the moment as anticipation surrounding Superman builds up. Anyhow, you can check out for yourself the most recent Twisters trailer and confirm this movie seems to be running on a pretty decent amount of on-screen charisma and not just busy images of windy destruction and fire tornadoes (hell yeah).
Twisters is directed by Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) from a screenplay by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant), who worked on a new story cracked by Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick). That creative team is nothing to sneeze at, so hopefully everything has come together in the end.