Twisters, the sequel to the 1996 iconic action flick Twister, is out next week on July 19. Until recently, you might not have even heard of the upcoming film, starring Top Gun: Maverick’s Glen Powell and Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones. As a huge fan of the original movie, and an unabashed tornado fiend, I worried it was destined to be a box office dud. But the last few days have felt like an F5 movie hype tornado has swept through town, bringing with it some of the best marketing I’ve seen in years and surprisingly positive reviews from critics who have seen the film. If the hype on the internet is a sign of things to come, Twisters is going to be the blockbuster movie of the summer (and maybe beyond).
First, there’s the subject matter: tornadoes are fucking cool, and the original Twister was an incredible movie because it centered them for the first time ever on film. Tornadoes are a uniquely American problem—though they happen elsewhere in the world, they happen so frequently here because of the geography of the United States: cold air comes sweeping down off the Rocky Mountains and into the flat plains of the Midwest, where its met with warm, wet air from the Gulf of Mexico and—boom—you’ve got the recipe for a tornado. 1996’s Twister was a technological marvel for how it portrayed these almighty storms, and hopefully Twisters can do the same—nothing says “blockbuster” more emphatically than sexy people getting pelted with wind, rain, and debris, and nothing screams “popcorn flick” louder than the animal-like roar of a column of hundred-mile-an-hour wind.
Then, there’s the Twisters cast, led by a man who could have on-screen sparks with a plank of wood, Glen Powell. In the past several years, the sex-negative movement has somewhat sanded Hollywood’s raunchy edges, but Powell stands in stark contrast to that—the last few films he’s been in were sexy rom-coms in which his chemistry with his co-stars was so palpable fans started saying he has the real-life equivalent of the heart eyes emoji. This week has given us a barrage of clips, pictures, and sound bites that show off Powell’s innate movie star quality, from a super-sexy Entertainment Weekly cover story that blatantly hints at an on-screen romance with Edgar-Jones, to him bringing his dog Brisket (whom he adopted from the Twisters set) to the Los Angeles premiere. Powell has so much star power, so much magnetism, that he got the king of Hollywood, Tom Cruise, to come to the premiere, hold up a Twisters-branded tub of popcorn, and tweet about the film. There’s a reason they’re calling Twisters this year’s Top Gun: Maverick…
And lastly, the marketing team behind Twisters has clearly decided to go the ‘90s Hollywood route, and it’s paying off. Billboards for the upcoming film look like they’ve been ripped away by strong wings and have furniture embedded in them, movie posters you’d see lining a theater are upside-down and sticking out of the ground in front of them, the glass display shattered. A bizarrely brilliant promo has wind booths in movie theaters around the country that simulate the feeling of being trapped in a tornado. There is something so tactile and retro about the marketing around Twisters, something that feels like it’s reaching back towards 1996 and saying, “we know the first movie whips, just wait until you see ours.”
I’ll be there on day one to see Twisters, and I think there will be a lot of people doing the same. Let’s get twisted.
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