Moviefone Editorial

Tag: jan-de-bont

Glen Powell joins ‘Twisters’
Glen Powell plays “Hangman” in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ from Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films.

Though he’s been working solidly for a few years now, Glen Powell is certainly having a moment thanks to his breakout role as Lt. Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’. He’s in demand and is now apparently in talks for another big gig.

As first reported on The Hot Mic Podcast, Powell has his eye on a role in ‘Twisters’, the follow-up to Jan de Bont’s 1996 heavy weather thriller, which starred Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt.
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‘Fresh’ actor Daisy Edgar-Jones is already aboard to star, and we could certainly see her and Powell as a charismatic lead duo.

Daisy Edgar-Jones in ‘Where the Crawdads Sing.’ Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures.

Related Article: A Sequel to 1996’s ‘Twister’ is Spinning Up at Universal, and Helen Hunt Could Return

Tell me about ‘Twister’

The original movie, which also featured the likes of Cary Elwes, Jami Gertz, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck and Todd Field (yes, the director of ‘Little Children’ and ‘TAR’) told the story of the Hardings (Hunt and Paxton) who must deal with their collapsing marriage even as they reunite to create an advanced weather warning system.

‘Twister’ was a success, earning $494 million worldwide, and lauded for its state-of-the-art effects. Yet no sequel was developed until much more recently.

Mark L. Smith, who wrote ‘The Revenant’ and George Clooney’s ‘The Midnight Sky’, has crafted a script that reportedly focus on the now-grown daughter of Jo and Bill Harding, who is a chip off the old storm-chasing block.

Steven Spielberg (who was a producer on the 1996 movie) is said to be thrilled by the new screenplay and eager for the movie to be made. And all involved are hoping that they can tempt Hunt back in some capacity, even if just for a cameo. Paxton, of course, sadly died in 2017.

Despite early work kicking off on this one back in 2020, you can certainly point to ‘Maverick’ being a spur for fresh development on this front. And in fact, that movie’s director Joseph Kosinski was attached to what was then being described as a reboot.

Though Kosinski ended up leaving to focus on the Formula One racing movie he has in development at Apple with Brad Pitt starring, the behind-the-scenes team is still being led by producer Frank Marshall (his wife and fellow powerhouse producer Kathleen Kennedy worked on the original with Spielberg).

Now, ‘Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung is in the director’s chair and Edgar-Jones is most likely playing the daughter character. We’ll have to wait and see how Powell fits in.

Daveed Diggs in ‘Extrapolations,’ premiering March 17, 2023 on Apple TV+.

In related ‘Twister’ sequel news, Daveed Diggs has spoken to Insider about another potential follow-up with which he was involved. Hunt stars in the ‘Blindspotting’ TV series that Diggs and Rafael Casal spun off from their indie movie. In 2021 they pitched the idea of Hunt directing a new take on ‘Twister’. But it didn’t happen, and Diggs has his suspicions as to why.

Here’s what he said,

“Oh man, I’m not going to get into it mostly because I’m probably going to misremember things. But all I’ll say is there was an opportunity where we were talking about that, and it didn’t happen, and the reasons that it didn’t happen are potentially shady. But shady in the way that we know the industry is shady.”

The answer, my friends, is probably blowing in the wind.

Bill Paxton as Dr. William “Bill/The Extreme” Harding in 1996’s ‘Twister.’

Other Movies Similar to ‘Twisters:’
- ‘Twister‘ (1996)
- ‘The Perfect Storm‘ (2000)
- ‘The Day After Tomorrow‘ (2004)
- ‘2012‘ (2009)
- ‘The Impossible‘ (2012)
- ‘Greenland‘ (2020)
- ‘Where the Crawdads Sing‘ (2022)
- ‘Top Gun: Maverick‘ (2022)
- ‘Devotion‘ (2022)
Buy ‘Twister’ On Amazon
April 14, 2023
‘Twister’ Sequel in the Works

(L to R) Helen Hunt as Dr. Joanne “Jo” Harding and Bill Paxton as Dr. William “Bill/The Extreme” Harding in 1996’s ‘Twister.’

If you’re seeing the sky change around you and hearing the distant rush of a wind vortex, that could be because the long-in-development follow-up to 1996’s ‘Twister’ is once more moving forward at Universal. We’ll let you guess what it’s called. Find out at the end of the story!

According to Deadline, Universal is working with Warner Bros. (though the latter is only providing financing and will get a cut of any profits) to crank up the wind machines again, 26 years since Jan de Bont had Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton leading a team of storm chasers into the path of giant, swirly twisters, all in the name of science.

The original movie, which also featured the likes of Cary Elwes, Jami Gertz, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck and Todd Field (yes, the director of new Cate Blanchett drama ‘TAR’) in the story of the Hardings (Hunt and Paxton) who must deal with their collapsing marriage even as they reunite to create an advanced weather warning system.

‘Twister’ was a success, earning $494 million worldwide, and lauded for its state-of-the-art effects. Yet no sequel was developed until much more recently.

Mark L. Smith, who wrote ‘The Revenant’ and George Clooney’s ‘The Midnight Sky’, has crafted a script that reportedly focus on the now-grown daughter of Jo and Bill Harding, who is a chip off the old storm-chasing block.

(L to R) Helen Hunt as Dr. Joanne “Jo” Harding and Bill Paxton as Dr. William “Bill/The Extreme” Harding in 1996’s ‘Twister.’

Steven Spielberg (who was a producer on the 1996 movie) is said to be thrilled by the new screenplay and eager for the movie to be made. And all involved are hoping that they can tempt Hunt back in some capacity, even if just for a cameo. Paxton, of course, sadly died in 2017.

Despite early work kicking off on this one back in 2020, you can certainly point to ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ being a spur for fresh development on this front. And in fact, that movie’s director Joseph Kosinski was attached to what was then being described as a reboot.

Though Kosinski ended up leaving to focus on the Formula One racing movie he has in development at Apple with Brad Pitt starring, the behind-the-scenes team is still being led by producer Frank Marshall (his wife and fellow powerhouse producer Kathleen Kennedy worked on the original with Spielberg).

Universal and Kennedy are looking for the right director, and names mentioned so far include ‘Free Solo’ duo Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vaserhelyi, ‘Prey’s Dan Trachtenberg and Laika animation boss Travis Knight, who in addition to the stop-motion likes of ‘Kubo and the Two Strings’, found success with live-action ‘Transformers’ prequel ‘Bumblebee’.

Other candidates are apparently in the mix, but the studio is hoping that the right person or team can be locked in quickly enough to start shooting in the spring. And that proposed title we teased at the start? ‘Twisters’. Yup, bet you’re glad you waited to read that. Will it change? That answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Bill Paxton as Dr. William “Bill/The Extreme” Harding in 1996’s ‘Twister.’
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October 18, 2022
Why Netflix’s ‘Haunting of Hill House’ Will Scratch Your ‘Stranger Things’ Itch

Netflix

There’s always been something inherently Halloween-y about Netflix’s “Stranger Things.”

The first season, while released in the summer of 2016, still piled on the spooky atmospherics and its winking references to filmmakers like John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg. Last year, they doubled down on that vibe, releasing the episodes right before Halloween and including a more autumnal storyline, complete with the boys dressing up for Halloween and a subplot about toxic pumpkins. But, sadly, “Stranger Things” won’t return until next summer, for a truncated, sunshine-y season which may leave you wondering if there’s anything that can scratch that itch. Well, we are here to tell you that there is and it’s coming to Netflix this Friday.

It’s time to add “The Haunting of Hill House” to your queue.

But let’s start at the beginning: For years, Steven Spielberg has wanted to remake “The Haunting,” Robert Wise’s 1963 chiller based on the Shirley Jackson novel “The Haunting of Hill House” (originally published in 1959). Made of equal parts visceral terror and psychological ease, the original film was a classy adaptation of the original story, maintaining its Gothic tone and emphasis on more cerebral frights. It’s easy to imagine a young Spielberg getting spooked by the film, to the point that one day he’d want to make it his own.

And he almost did.

In the mid-‘90s, Spielberg called upon Stephen King to adapt “The Haunting of Hill House” for a new generation, using the real-life Winchester Mystery Mansion as inspiration. Unfortunately, they couldn’t agree on what the film should be and when Spielberg formally rejected King’s script, King continued to work on it, eventually turning it into the somewhat underrated TV miniseries “Rose Red.”

Eventually, Spielberg finally got his “Haunting” remake (below), only it was directed by “Speed” filmmaker Jan de Bont and made for Spielberg’s then-nascent DreamWorks studio.

DreamWorks

Unfortunately, the movie was a flop, both critically and commercially (it made $91 million domestically against a budget of more than $80 million), and a true, great renovation of the Jackson story and Wise movie remained, tantalizingly, out of reach.

Until, of course, in 2017, when Netflix announced that it was launching an ambitious series to be based on “The Haunting of Hill House,” once again produced by Spielberg. This time, however, it was written and directed (in its entirety) by Mike Flanagan, a filmmaker who has become something of a horror auteur, thanks to his recent films “Oculus,” “Hush,” and “Gerald’s Game” (an adaptation of a seemingly un-filmable Stephen King novel).

For his new, multi-part version of the story, Flanagan has chosen to examine the lives of those who lived in the sprawling, deeply haunted (or is it?) mansion, toggling between their time in the house and their lives now. All sorts of parallels can be drawn between actual trauma, both psychological and supernatural, and how that trauma can affect your daily life, and it’s a testament to Flanagan’s take that he has assembled such a starry roster of talent, including (but not limited to) Carla Gugino, Elizabeth Reaser, Kate Siegel, Annabeth Gish, Henry Thomas, and Timothy Hutton.

And the critics seem to agree that the right adaptation was worth the wait. Sadie Gennis from TV Guide said that, “It’s as though Flanagan has taken Jackson’s original work, shattered it and then rearranged the pieces to create a completely original, but equally brilliant tale.” Variety said, “It’s an effective scare-fest that is at its best when the tale does more than jolt the viewer.”

So if you’re looking to recapture that “Stranger Things” spirit, well, “The Haunting of Hill House” seems to be a smart choice. With its time-shifting narrative, you’ll get plenty of that delicious “Stranger Things”-esque nostalgia. Plus, the new series’ emphasis on family dynamics and the kind of emotionally honest response to supernatural shenanigans, will undoubtedly remind you of “Stranger Things” as well.

So, even though you can’t visit the Upside Down this year, you can at least check into Hill House. Scary, right?

October 8, 2018