Glen Powell joins ‘Twisters’

The ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ breakout star is in talks to join the long-gestating disaster movie follow-up.

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.

Twisters

"Chase. Ride. Survive."

PG-132 hr 3 minJul 19th, 2024

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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.

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.