Can Twisters be a Hit?

The movie Twisters is due out July 19.

I have to admit that, in spite of seeing it listed as one of those movies that Hollywood insiders are counting on to save the season, the year and Hollywood (like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine), I paid the movie little mind. After all, Twisters is a follow-up to a movie that was a hit way back in 1996, with nothing since come of it, giving me the impression of Hollywood scraping the bottom of the barrel for past hits it could rework (like Gladiator 2, also coming out this year). This is all the more the case given that the market for sequels selling brand-name action-adventure spectacle is not what it was even a couple of years ago (don't let the entertainment press' rah-rah make you forget how disastrous 2023, and so far, 2024 as well, have been for movies of the type), while disaster movies have not done well in quite some time (partly, I think, because the scaling up of the action movie, and especially the superhero movie, made pretty much every action movie a disaster movie in some degree).

Not wholly disregarding the above in its weighing of the movie's "pros" and "cons" Boxoffice Pro informs us that the backers of the film are counting on nostalgia and star power to sell the film--which seem to me to be a weak basis for expectations of success. After all, '90s nostalgia has been no match for '80s nostalgia as a hit-maker--all as, I think, the original Twister has little cachet as a distinctly '90s moment. (People may remember the bit with the cow being carried across the road by the tornado's winds--but does this memory scream "'90s" to them the way other things might?) Meanwhile star power has been fickle in the best of times, and can seem all but nonexistent in the post-star twenty-first century, especially in the case of those younger actors who only became Names in this century. (The commentators may tell us that Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones are draws, but I am sure I was not the only one who had to look up who both those people were, while after checking out her IMDB page, I saw scant evidence for Ms. Edgar-Jones having a blockbuster-caliber draw in her credits to date.)

Indeed, rather than the movie playing like that other nostalgia-star power blend Top Gun: Maverick, Twisters seemed to me more comparable to that other belated sequel to a disaster movie hit of 1996, Independence Day: Resurgence, which fell flat at the box office (its gross scarcely a fifth of the original's in real terms)--the more in as Twisters lacks Top Gun 2's other advantages (namely the extreme weakness of the competition at the time of its release, for if 2024 is far from strong that way this movie has the misfortune of hitting theaters the week before Deadpool & Wolverine's possibly record-crushing debut; and the breathless cheer-leading of the media for the return of Tom Cruise to the skies in a Navy fighter).*

The result is that the magazine's prediction of a range of $65-$95 million was a surprise. If not particularly spectacular (compare it with the opening we have just seen for Inside Out 2, or what is projected for Deadpool & Wolverine), and leaves the movie a long way away from matching the original's gross in real, inflation-adjusted terms (even at the high end of the range it would have to quintuple its opening weekend gross to do that, a tall order indeed), it is still better than I expected--and in fact I remain skeptical, the more in as there are several weeks to go.* After all, last year we did see predictions for films crumble between the first projection and the opening weekend, and then the movie's actual opening weekend performance actually prove weaker than the bottom end of the last range indicated. (Thus did Boxoffice Pro's projection for The Flash fall from $115-$140 million to $60-$80 million over those few weeks, and the film actually take in just $55 million over the three-day period.) There is as yet no reason to think Twisters will suffer that, certainly in the absence of the idiocies that surrounded the promotion of those films that suffered that fate last year (as The Flash did), while some films do see their prospects rise greatly over the same time frame (as Oppenheimer and especially Barbie did, with their performance beating even the elevated expectations for both). Still, the point is that this prediction seems uncertain, enough so that I am not going to bother venturing any estimates--though I will be looking to the updates with interest.

* The original Independence Day made $306 million in 1996--equal to $468 million in 2016, when the sequel came out. Resurgence, however, made just $103 million domestically, which is why, contrary to the promise at the movie's conclusion, we have yet to see an Independence Day 3 (though don't rule that out yet given how desperate Hollywood is to crank out more sequels these days).
** Twister's domestic gross of just under $242 million back in 1996 is equal to $485 million in today's terms--a doubling corresponding to the rise in the budget. (Where the first Twister's production cost was an estimated $92 million, the figure for the new film is $200 million--before one gets into the non-production costs that have probably risen by an even greater margin.)