Chasing tornados seems to have been a phenomenon of the 90s, with shaky cam footage of dust deserts being thrown up and people in 4x4s screaming ‘Awesome!’ and ‘I might die any minute…but this is Cool!’.
Hollywood dutifully jumped on the bandwagon and we had the Bill Paxton starring Twister in 1996 which, when looked back on, had a ton of talent attached. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Helen Hunt joined Paxton and there was even a role for writer/director Todd Field in Jan De Bont’s tale with a twist(er), and Michael Crichton had a hand in the writing. While it never set my world on fire, and didn’t do the business that was expected, having its thunder stolen by other special effects disaster movies doing the rounds at the time, it can still be enjoyed today and Bill Paxton himself thinks it’s time for a sequel.
In conversation with PremiumHollywood Paxton talks about how tracking the trail of a 1925 tornado led to an idea of a Twister sequel.
[The tornado] went across the Wabash, into Indiana, staying on the ground three and a half hours and cutting a damage path 219 miles long, killing about 700 people…They had footage from a biplane that the government sent down, just to do aerial footage of all of the destruction and the damage. So we just did that to kind of get some ideas, and from that I kind of extrapolated an idea for a sequel. And I kind of put that together into a format, and now we’re kind of waiting to see if that’s going to move forward.That would need Steven Spielberg’s blessing, ultimately, and they probably won’t take it to him ‘til there’s real studio interest, but I think the 3D applications of that could obviously be pretty amazing.
I’m not doubting that being caught in the middle of a 3D tornado would be a pretty cool thing to see (and those flying cows would look pretty sweet in 3D), but is that enough to get people back on the Twister wagon?
