Why We All Have a Stake in Twisters’ Success

'Twisters,' the latest broad blockbuster directed by an indie darling, demonstrates the promise and pitfalls of Hollywood's current approach to franchise fare.

No one makes a movie in a vacuum. Even filmmakers working with the most micro of microbudgets want their films to be seen; movies are, after all, a mode of communication, a way of celebrating shared experiences or locating common ground amid differences. It’s no wonder filmmakers who make a big splash with a small film often want to stretch their horizons by working on a larger canvas, with a fatter budget and flashier stars, all in the service of speaking to us.

One of the surprise indie hits of 2020 was Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, an intimate, semi-autobiographical drama about a Korean American family struggling to establish a farm in rural Arkansas. Minari earned six Academy Award nominations; one of its stars, Youn Yuh-jung—as a swearing, card-playing Korean grandma—won for Best Supporting Actress. And its success brought Chung a golden opportunity: this summer sees the release of Twisters, his reimagining of Jan de Bont’s nature-gone-wild thriller Twister, from 1996. In Twisters, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell play rival storm chasers tearing through Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley—though it turns out that even though she’s a serious-minded researcher and he’s a YouTube star, they have more in common than they think.

Twisters is a movie with a $200 million budget; Minari cost $2 million. That makes Chung just the latest in a long line of directors who have grabbed the chance to leap from low-key indie success to blockbuster attention grabber. More broadly, though, a big swing like this is a test of how we moviegoers feel about filmmakers as artists. Everyone loves an underdog hero. But what happens when a filmmaker sets their sights on a bigger project, one designed to reach a wider audience—and, ideally, to net a handsome payoff? Is that selling out or stepping up? And in a climate where movies designed to be viewed on the big screen face an uncertain future, is it an act of hope or an exercise in futility?

People who watch lots of movies tend to treasure indie filmmakers. Unbowed by big-studio expectations, they’re often the people doing the most interesting work. That’s why we feel stung when a filmmaker appears to be selling out. Suddenly, somehow, they’re no longer on “our” side. As consumers of culture and everything else, we may be motivated by money—who isn’t, to some degree? But we expect purity from creative people.

In the world of moviemaking, that’s an idea that could hold us back—especially if we want smarter, better mainstream movies. Let’s take Rian Johnson, whose first feature, the 2005 teenage noir Brick, earned enough acclaim to allow him to make movies on an increasingly larger scale. On the ladder of big-ticket potential crowd pleasers, you can’t get much higher than a Star Wars film, and Johnson got his chance with the 2017 Star Wars: Episode VII—The Last Jedi. But hardcore fans of the series rebelled. Many felt he’d taken the story and the characters in the wrong direction. More insidious were fans’ complaints about what they called, to use a slippery and increasingly sinister word, the story’s wokeness. As Emily St. James wrote in a 2017 Vox article parsing fans’ complaints, the movie’s “millennial good guys are a young white woman, a black man, a woman of Asian descent, and a Latino man, while its millennial bad guys are two white dudes.” That didn’t sit well, she said, with a fandom that “has long been presided over by white guys.”

Though The Last Jedi performed well enough at the box office, it’s generally treated by fans as a Star Wars fail. But it’s a pretty terrific movie, an emotionally generous work with both a sense of humor about itself and a sense of joy. In other words, Johnson’s sensibilities shine through the template laid out by George Lucas nearly a half-century ago. If you care about the greater landscape of film, that’s exactly what you should want when a thoughtful director takes on a franchise property.

But the realities of modern big-ticket filmmaking aren’t for the faint of heart. Chloé Zhao’s austere, low-budget Nomadland won three Oscars in 2021, including Best Picture and Best Director. (The third award, for Best Actress, went to the movie’s star, Frances McDormand.) By that time, Zhao’s next movie, the Marvel entry Eternals—heavy on green-screen special effects and featuring a roster of stars including Gemma Chan, Angelina Jolie, and Salma Hayek—was already in the works. But when it was finally released, in November 2021, neither critics nor Marvel fans liked it. Part of the problem, Zhao suggested in a 2022 Empire interview, was that amid the pandemic, audiences weren’t in the mood for what she described as a film “about existential crisis, both for humanity and God.” That may sound like the understatement of the century, but Zhao was onto something. The ideas she cares about, and the intimate style of filmmaking that’s clearly her forte, were quite obviously at odds with the Marvel machine—though that’s Marvel’s problem, not hers. Sometimes indie filmmakers who stretch their wings learn plenty about the kinds of movies they don’t want to make.

For indie filmmakers who haven’t won an Oscar, a big movie can serve as a calling card in the greater world. Colin Trevorrow made his debut with the charming 2012 sci-fi comedy Safety Not Guaranteed, though his Jurassic World movies are what made him famous. And some filmmakers build a career by making increasingly ambitious films over several years. In the early 2000s, Greta Gerwig was one of DIY cinema maestro Joe Swanberg’s go-to performers. She hopscotched from mumblecore to directing the megahit Barbie, with Lady Bird and Little Women in between.

Always, though, the big question is this: Can a director with a light touch, like Chung, bring his special sensibility to a bigger project—one that comes with outsize expectations attached? Studios—in Twisters’ case, Universal—have something to gain by hiring a Lee Isaac Chung to direct a big movie. His name brings cachet to a film that might otherwise be considered just another workaday blockbuster. And depending on how high your expectations are, Twisters is an engaging enough summer diversion. Chung knows he’s making a monster movie, one in which the chaos of nature reigns: he hints at this in big ways and small ones, with dashes of wit. (One tornado whirls toward a small-town movie theater that happens to have programmed a classic-monster-movie festival.) The special effects are regal and terrifying: at one point, twin twisters show up on the horizon, slender and dust-clouded at the bottom but fanning out, like Tiffany lily vases, at the top. There’s a great deal of driving, as the storm chasers zip around in search of their next conquest, and there are many, many shots of debris flying into the air and then, dangerously, clattering back to earth. That’s the reality of tornadoes; Twisters captures it, in places even incorporating footage of real-life twisters.

There are human stars, too, of course. Edgar-Jones’ Kate, much like Helen Hunt’s Jo in the original, is an Oklahoma-born weather scientist who has always dreamed of finding a way to lessen the severity of tornadoes and thus save lives. She meets her match in Powell’s swaggering Tyler, a cocky former rodeo rider from Arkansas—though in reality, he too is a science nerd who seeks to save lives.

Chung is an earnest filmmaker, and this is one area where his ideals may be a liability: it’s not enough for these characters just to obsessively chase down crazy weather; they must also spend the proper amount of time expressing angst over the damage it can do. Twisters is kind of a sweet movie, even as it invites us to relish the usual disaster-film stuff, like bodies being cruelly flung into the air and sucked into oblivion. Chung can’t fully resolve those two elements.

But there’s no doubt about his love for the movie’s setting. Minari was drawn from Chung’s experience: when he was a kid, his Korean-born parents moved the family from Atlanta to a small farm in rural Arkansas. Minari was shot in Oklahoma, as Twisters was, but it’s a corner of the world in which Chung feels completely at home. Even with its CGI’ed tornadoes, the landscape still feels visceral and vital, a wide-open expanse of red-dirt roads and skies streaked with melancholy-elegant gray clouds.

From an economic standpoint, of course it matters whether Twisters—which is expected to bring in $50 million to $55 million when it opens in North America this weekend—is a hit or not: you can hate the monolith known as the industry, but the sad reality is that anyone who cares about seeing movies on the big screen has a stake in that industry’s survival. At one point Kate stands in the center of a wind-ruffled plain, having detected an approaching storm. “Man,” she says, “I love Oklahoma!” That’s a big sentiment, just made to play out on a big screen. With Twisters, Chung puts all his faith in the big-screen idea, and in the staggering beauty of the open sky. Maybe that’s a gamble. Or maybe it’s just a way of looking up and out, a way of stretching the boundaries of what you thought you could do. And you can’t put a price tag on that.