Lee Isaac Chung’s tornado terror has overperformed in North America, even as it gets a more muted debut overseas.
Giddy-up, tornado wranglers – Twisters is kicking up a storm, blowing everyone away, and delivering industry analysts the easiest day at the headline-writing office in some time. The film debuted stateside to an above-expectations $80.5m opening weekend, fueled by solid reviews, word-of-mouth and a strong showing in the mid-west – where tornados are a more real phenomenon than the cow-flinging franchise might suggest.
Overseas, it’s a more muted, but perfectly respectable story. In the UK, Twisters made $5.5m over the weekend, making Blighty the film’s second largest market by some margin. Apparently, the UK also has the most annual tornadoes per land area per year of any European country, at 0.14 per 1000 km2, but I’m not entirely sure the two facts are related. I’ve personally never seen a tornado suck up a pick-up truck (the issue, I suspect, is that we don’t really have any pick-up trucks).
The less fancy $123m global total really comes down to the film underperforming in China, where it made just $1.5m, as foreign films continue to struggle in the country’s increasingly isolationist market.
Interestingly, this is more-or-less the opposite of what happened with the first Twister in 1996, which took advantage of a universal fear of high winds to generate a hefty worldwide box office. For a time, it was the second-highest grossing Hollywood film in China, behind James Cameron’s True Lies (China had begun allowing certain US films in its cinemas for the first time in 1994).
Read more: Film Quiz Friday | How About This Weather?
Still, the success of a straightforward, all-American action movie (one scene involves a woman in a stars-and-stripes cowboy outfit, riding a horse, carrying an American flag and launching fireworks while country music plays in the background) feels like a good sign for cinemas stateside and elsewhere. It’s good news, too, for Glen Powell, whose star-power branding will only have gotten stronger after his second box office hit in the last year (Anyone But You bowed out with $220m following a Christmas season debut in 2023).
Universal and Warner Bros (who are distributing the film globally) will be hoping the blockbuster will draw in enough non-superhero fans to stand up against Marvel’s Deadpool And Wolverine, which makes its much-anticipated (and R-rated) debut on Thursday.
If you fancy a bit more Twisters-related fun, check out Simon’s lovely chat with the film’s director, Lee Isaac Chung. It’s a podcast, so you could even listen while running away from an F5 tornado (though we wouldn’t recommend it).
