Twister Sequel Adds Transformers Star

In the Heights and Transformers star Anthony Ramos has reportedly joined the cast of Twisters, the reinvention of the ’90s action hit Twister. The star will join Daisy Edgar-Jones, best known for her role in the British miniseries Normal People, in the blockbuster, which is set to be directed by Minari‘s Lee Isaac Chung from a script by The Revenant‘s Mark L. Smith. Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) also stars. After making a name for himself on stage with Hamilton and in film with a role in the Oscar-winning A Star Is Born, the Grammy-winning and Emmy-nominated Ramos has jumped right into big franchise entertainment.

He will soon appear in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts for Paramount. Other upcoming projects include Marvel’s Iron Heart for Disney+, as well as the feature films Distant for Amblin and Dumb Money for Sony.

Frank Marshall, known for the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchises, is producing via his banner, the Kennedy/Marshall Company. 

The original Twister was co-written by Michael Crichton and produced by Kathleen Kennedy, who is married to Marshall. It was directed by Jan de Bont, who had blown up thanks to his work on the Keanu Reeves/Sandra Bullock action vehicle (no pun intended) Speed two years earlier. Twister was a blockbuster spectacle that heralded a lot of upcoming trends in movie-making, including CGI post-production (courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic), and a global box office haul of $494.5 million, making it the second-highest-grossing movie of 1996.

“I read that like a month or two ago. I said, ‘Wow. Are they going to do the F5 now? I bet you that’s what it is,’” de Bont said during a recent interview. “You cannot do it by making it bigger. That as a movie hardly ever works. You have to come up … with people actually involved in it. You cannot just … it’s like, I’ll work on the destruction scene. We’re going to get worse and whole cities are going to get destroyed. That’s exactly like falling in the trap of having the special effects completely take over.”

h/t Deadline