Kiernan Shipka, star of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, is set to join the cast of Twisters, the upcoming reinvention of Twister, the 1996 Universal/Amblin action movie starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. The film, which will not be a direct sequel to the original blockbuster, is set to be directed by Minari‘s Lee Isaac Chung from a script by The Revenant‘s Mark L. Smith. Joining Shipka will be Harry Hadden-Paton (Downton Abbey), Sasha Lane (American Honey), Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men), Nik Dodani (Atypical), David Corenswet (Pearl), Tunde Adebimpe (Spider-Man: Homecoming) and Katy O’Brian (Black Lightning, Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania).
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Deadline, who first reported the huge growth of the cast, has no details on the actual characters or plot yet, which are being kept under wraps. The movie will center around a group of storm chasers who are tracking an F5 tornado.
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.”
The new actors join a cast that includes Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, Glen Powell, Brandon Perea and Daryl McCormack. Frank Marshall, known for the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchises, is producing via his banner, the Kennedy/Marshall Company.
Twisters, which is set to be co-financed by Warner Bros. Pictures, will be released by Universal on July 19, 2024.
