Twister Sequel Gets Release Date

The long-awaited sequel to Twister finally has a release date. Tuesday, Universal dated the follow-up—officially titled Twisters—for July 19, 2024. That means Lee Isaac Chung, the Oscar-nominated director behind Minari, and crew have roughly a year and some change to get the film through production. It’s expected the sequel will begin filming in the spring. Chung will direct from a script written by The Revenant‘s Mark L. Smith.

Though little is known about the film, it’s expected to follow the storm-chasing career of the daughter had by Jo (Helen Hunt) and Bill Harding (the late Bill Paxton). It’s hopeful Hunt will return to the project, which is being produced by Frank Marshall and co-financed by Warner Bros. Pictures.

The original was produced by Kathleen Kennedy, now the head of Lucasfilm, and made a staggering $494.5 million at the box office. It’s global box office haul was the second-highest sum of 1996. Jan de Bont directed the first picture, and spoke to the news of a reboot in 2020.

“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 shared with Collider about the project. “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.”

The original film saw Bill (Bill Paxton) reuniting with his old team of storm chasers to ensure that his wife Jo (Helen Hunt) signed their divorce papers so he could move on with his new relationship. The timing of these efforts lined up with the debut of a high-tech device they’d spent years working on together, with Bill reuniting with his team to see his creation unveiled, resulting in a number of action-packed sequences of tornados causing chaos in Oklahoma.