All the Ways Twisters Pays Homage to the Original Twister

Publish date: 2024-08-21

SPOILER WARNING: This article discusses plot points from “Twisters,” now playing in theaters.

If you’re heading to your local theater to see “Twisters” and wondering “Do I need to see the original ‘Twister’ first?” Well, no. But revisiting the movie certainly would enhance the experience.

The Lee Issac Chung-directed disaster movie is a standalone story from Jan de Bont’s 1996 classic about an eccentric band of storm chasers led by Helen Hunt and the late Bill Paxton. And a couple days before starting production in Oklahoma, “Twisters” star Daisy Edgar-Jones had the idea to get the cast and crew together to revisit the original movie.

“We rented out the theater,” Chung tells Variety. “It was a very loud theatrical experience where we were all laughing, people were shouting [their favorite lines], and afterwards, you heard people saying, ‘Jami Gertz got robbed. Poor Melissa!’”

In “Twisters,” Edgar-Jones plays Kate Cooper, a retired tornado chaser who returns to work with an old college friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos) on a new team. Glen Powell plays Tyler Owens, a social media-famous storm chaser, known as the “Tornado Wrangler.” There are no characters that carry over between the movies, nor surprise family ties. (Kate’s not Jo and Bill’s long-lost daughter, but she did study at their alma mater, Muskogee State College.)

Instead, the cast and crew — some who worked on both films, including VFX supervisor Ben Snow, production designer Patrick Sullivan and Kevin Kelleher, a former analyst at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who served as the technical advisor — found little ways to pay homage to “Twister,” from their wardrobe and Easter eggs in the production design to a few ad-libbed lines and one special cameo.

“I was just trying to honor that first film and those elements that I love about it, but also to try to let this be something that is coming from me and the things that enliven me, and the choices that that I believe in,” Chung explains. “The producers were all about that, telling me, ‘Make ‘Twisters’ as though this is your film and don’t worry too much about that original.’ I found that to be very liberating.”

He adds: “All those Easter eggs were done out of a lot of joy.”

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