Twister's Bill Paxton Had A 'Tougher' Sequel Idea In Mind Years Ago

Jan de Bont's "Twister" might be regarded nowadays as one of the most thrilling blockbusters of the 1990s, but when it hit theaters on May 10, 1996, the first, heavily-hyped summer tentpole out of the gate that year, it felt like a bit of a miss. Responses varied, mostly because you really needed to see the film on a massive screen in a theater outfitted with top-grade sound –- this way, the visual/aural sensation concocted by de Bont and the best of the best at ILM and Skywalker Sound could blow you up, up and out of the cineplex, thus distracting you from the bland characters and preposterously thin plot. (Helen Hunt's character needs to face and survive an F5 tornado to exorcize her childhood demons.)

Actually, there's a world in which this is an awesomely preposterous plot, but "Twister" offers only mechanical blockbuster storytelling. The film –- from which great things were expected given this was de Bont's follow-up to one of the truly great blockbusters of the 1990s in "Speed" –- didn't want to get wild; it just wanted to deliver the eye-popping, ear-splitting goods, hype you for the planned theme park ride, and maybe kick off a franchise.

Interestingly, that last objective is only now being met in 2024 with Lee Isaac Chung's "Twisters." There were a few toe-dip developments over the years (including one with Hunt as writer-director), but Universal Pictures and, most importantly, Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment were never, sorry, blown away by any of the pitches.

We'll find out if they hit on the right idea later this summer, but there is one intriguing "what if" to which we'll never have the answer. Hunt's co-star, Bill Paxton, had a notion for how the sequel should play out. And to my mind, the "Twister 2" he wanted to make is the one I wanted the first time out.

In a 2012 "Random Roles" interview with The AV Club's Will Harris, Paxton, who died unexpectedly five years later of a stroke at the age of 61, revealed that he would've loved to direct a second "Twister" — one that'd give viewers a wilder, more visually immersive ride.

"I've always felt like there was a 'Jaws' version of that movie," said Paxton. "I always felt like we did the Pepsi Lite version of that movie." How would a caffeinated Paxton take on "Twister" play out? Here's what he told Harris:

"There's a tougher version of that movie that I think now [...] I've kind of designed it so that me and Helen [Hunt] would have a daughter, a junior in high school, but she's already dating a guy in college, and we'd kind of hand it off to them. There's a great story of the Tri-State Tornado I'd like to tie into it as well."

Let's start with the story: a changing of the tornado-chasing guard would allow Paxton to, at the very least, take a step back and focus on the filmmaking. As to how he'd make this narratively compelling, we'll never know. But the idea of bringing a natural disaster on the scale of the 1925 Tri-State Tornado to the big-screen ... now, that sounds like an Irwin Allen-scaled "Jaws" (with, hopefully, none of the star-studded cheesiness –- which worked for those 1970s hoots, but would tonally clash with a post-Spielberg blockbuster flick).

Though Paxton's vision was, at the time, very much wedded to a benumbing aesthetic trend that was driving early 2010s tentpoles, he believed he could do something special with the technology.

In 2012, if you were making a big-budget studio event flick, you were most likely either shooting it in native 3D or preparing for the film to be post-converted to 3D (so that theaters could price-gouge ticket buyers with bogus, ugly-looking visual spectacle). Paxton understood the pitfalls of the tech, and was prepared to do something audacious with it ... perhaps like his pal James Cameron had done three years earlier with "Avatar."

"You know, 3-D and all this kind of fantasy stuff," said Paxton, "It just kind of washes over you. But to have something that's real, a weather phenomenon like a tornado, and to use the 3-D technology to create that, I think it'd really be a nail-biting, on-the-edge-of-your-seat experience.

Paxton noted the early 2010s uptick in highly destructive tornadoes as an inspiration to recreate a once-in-a-century cataclysm like the Tri-State Tornado. You can obviously read about the disaster online, but Paxton described it in effectively succinct detail to The AV Club.

As Paxton told Harris:

"The Tri-State is the biggest they've got on record. It came down over the Ozarks in Missouri on March 18, 1925, and it stayed on the ground for three and a half hours, which is a record. They call it the Tri-State because it started in Missouri, crossed the Mississippi River, and cut a path of destruction all the way across southern Illinois and across southwest Indiana, killing a bunch of people."

The final death toll was 751. Considering that some of these areas are way more populated a century later, that number would almost certainly be somewhere in four digits.

Fortunately, the distressing F4 tornado trend of 2010 and 2011 (there were 13 in the former and 17 in the latter) has tapered off, but nature could still deliver a wallop at any moment. Is there an off-putting disaster porn element to the "Twister" franchise? Of course. But with climate change threatening to make swaths of the planet increasingly uninhabitable, these films are perversely necessary and queasily entertaining (if pulled off with more conviction and expertise than 2014's dreadful "Into the Storm" and its quickie sequel). I wish Paxton — a fine director whose "Frailty" is one of the best horror films of the 2000s — had hung around long enough to rattle us with his apocalyptic thrill ride.