Is Twisters a Flop?

Last summer I had something to say of Twisters' prospects and early performance.

As we are now in December we can safely discuss how it all went in the end.

As it happened the movie made some $371 million globally in its theatrical run.

It is not a spectacular figure by the standard of big summer movies--or for that matter, any movie that costs $150-$200 million for the production, before marketing costs come in.

. It is also not a spectacular figure relative to the original 1996 Twister--which made a little under a half billion globally three inflationary decades ago, and which if we adjusted its gross for inflation would be a billion dollar hit in today's terms (which is to say that it made almost three times what Twisters did).

Yet the entertainment press treated Twisters not as a colossal letdown (the way they rushed to do with the comparable Independence Day 2, another sequel to a hit from 1996 that actually made more money than Twisters did eight years later), but rather talked up what a big hit it supposedly was.

There are three reasons for that.

1. Twisters, if not a runaway success like the original, did relatively well in North America, where it took in some $268 million--72 percent of the total. Had, as is more typical with big summer blockbusters the domestic/foreign split been the other way around, with the movie making 72 percent of its money outside North America on top of that $268 million take we would have every reason to call it a good-sized hit in light of the near-billion dollar take. Indeed, had it merely matched its domestic gross internationally the way the original Twister did (and so finished north of $500 million+) the producers would have reason to feel it hadn't been a bad idea. But it didn't--and if this depressed the global take the fact got less attention than it might have given that most writing about these matters focuses on the home market.

2. In spite of the fact that the biggest movies make as much now as they could have been expected to before the pandemic (Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun 2, Avatar 2, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Inside Out 2, etc.), in line with its members' duties as courtiers and claqueurs and the fact of smaller theatrical revenues on the whole, the entertainment press has (even while resisting drawing any broader conclusions from the situation) lowered its bar for judging movie performance generally, such that a gross of $268 million domestically now is talked up in a way that $268 million wouldn't have been five years ago, especially where there is room to take a "glass half full" view of the situation. (The fact that the original Twister came out so long ago and really big hits so few these years and that international failure is relatively easy to slight all made it easier in this case.)

3. Early on the media started pushing the narrative that Twisters was a case of Hollywood playing to the Red states it supposedly shunned most of the time, and profiting by it--an ideologically freighted narrative that those taking this line would not have marred by facts and numbers and such, such as we have seen in the past. (The reader may recall how back in 2015 the media pushed the idea that Mad Max: Fury Road was a feminist movie that had become a commercial triumph, when the movie was not really that big a ticket-seller by summer action movie standards, and indeed a money-loser--with, perhaps, the fact that this political narrative is turned about in this case telling of a broad rightward shift on the part of the "centrist" media in this way as in others.)

Still, even if the movie is absolutely not an unqualified hit, and indeed almost inarguably a commercial failure by several standards (comparison with the original's box office performance, expectations for $200 million summer spectacles generally, and the weakness of the international box office by just about any measure), it is not wholly out of the question that when everything is reckoned up we will see that home entertainment and the rest of the post-theatrical income stream carried the movie to and even beyond the break-even point given the way these things tend to go. (Of the rough $370 million gross the studio probably got somewhere around $180 million. Add in another 80 percent from those other revenue streams such as has been common in recent years, and you end up with $330 million+, which I think would probably do the job according to the usual, admittedly imperfect, accounting.)

Still, that the movie did not do better in a summer of what was on the whole limited competition, is a reminder of the fact that there was no real demand out there for a new edition of the old hit, and that Hollywood is really milking any old success of this kind it can find as it refuses to reckon with what seems a more limited appetite than before for this kind of spectacle.

It also seems to me telling of what I had to say about the hits of last year--that Hollywood's best road to profitability may be, instead of putting up tentpoles and hoping "everyone" comes, producing movies with a deep appeal to more limited audiences, while keeping the budget in check. I doubt there was any such strategy at work with Twisters (rather than a movie that would play well in the Red states its backers hoped for a movie that would play well everywhere when they put up that $200 million+, and just failed to achieve that), but another film that followed just three weeks later followed it perfectly. It Ends with Us grossed almost as much at the box office as Twisters ($351 million to Twisters' $371 million)--on a budget of a mere $25 million. The result makes It Ends with Us likely to be one of the most profitable movies of 2024, perhaps the most profitable in relative terms and in terms of absolute profit plausibly one of the top ten on Deadline's list next year--a distinction Twisters seems very unlikely to enjoy.