1996’s iconic disaster movie Twister was a true box office blockbuster, but its star, Bill Paxton, had one major criticism of the movie itself. Starring Paxton and Helen Hunt in star-making roles, Jan de Bont’s Academy Award-winning epic follows a group of storm chasers attempting to deploy brand-new research equipment directly into a storm during a severe tornado outbreak on the plains of Oklahoma. Twister is considered one of the premier summer blockbusters from the 1990s, and it’s once again become culturally relevant with its standalone sequel, Twisters, setting the tone at the box office for summer 2024.
Twister broke new ground in visual and sound effects, and as a result the action was considered a cut above contemporary action and sci-fi thrillers. Playing the storm chaser Bill Harding, Bill Paxton was right in the middle of the original’s best storm-chasing scenes. However, a criticism he made well after the movie’s debut relates directly to those action sequences, and it’s something that Paxton himself wanted to address in the future.
Bill Paxton Felt Twister Could Have Been More Intense
Paxton also had ideas on how to make a sequel more intense
As wild as some of the action sequences were in Twister, Bill Paxton believes that the movie in general could have been more intense. In a 2012 interview with AV Club, Paxton spoke about how Twister has held up over time, and he specifically addressed how the movie didn’t go as far as he believed it could have. He even specifically addressed how he wanted to direct a sequel to Twister himself. Paxton opined:
I’ve always felt like there was a Jaws version of that movie. I always felt like we did the Pepsi Lite version of that movie. [Laughs.] There’s a tougher version of that movie…
Paxton actually pitched an R-rated Twister sequel that would have been far more intense than the original. The late actor intended to draw on the 1925 Tri-State tornado outbreak, a three-day stretch that saw 12 tornadoes, including one of the largest and deadliest on record, ravage Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. That single massive tornado lasted almost four hours, ranged well over 200 miles and killed nearly 700 people. By using that outbreak as inspiration, Paxton’s proposed sequel would have had a much darker tone than the original Twister, and would have been far more intense in its action sequences.
Twisters (Partly) Resolves Bill Paxton’s Issue With The Original Movie
Twisters boasts scenes that are far more intense than anything in the original
Twisters actually addresses Paxton’s thoughts about the original, even though it is considered a stand-alone sequel and not a direct continuation of the story. Thanks largely to modern effects, the tornadoes themselves are even more intense than anything seen in Twister, although to be fair, those storms do hold up particularly well from an effects standpoint. Right from the beginning, Twisters elevates the palpable danger with a storm so intense that several characters are ripped right off the ground and killed.
Key Details for the Twister Franchise | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Movie | Release Date | Budget | Box Office Gross | RT Tomatometer | RT Popcornmeter |
Twister | 1996 | $92 million | $495.7 million | 66% | 58% |
Twisters | 2024 | $155 million | $376.7 million | 75% | 91% |
Frankly, the storms are so intense in Twisters that they seem like living, breathing monsters as opposed to weather phenomena, and the movie flirts with horror at certain moments. The deadly tornado scene at the rodeo, which actually featured a cameo from Bill Paxton’s son, is scarier than any storm depicted in the original Twister. The ending of Twisters puts an exclamation point on the whole affair, as the ultra-intense theater scene is above and beyond anything seen before in disaster movies, and certainly gets closer to the R-rated baseline that Paxton would have worked off of in his proposed sequel.
Source: AV Club