'Twisters' Box Office - Six Key Takeaways From a Huge $81 Million Debut Weekend

"If you feel it, chase it" is now the catchphrase of the summer as Universal successfully sold its legacy sequel as a crowdpleasing, star-packed studio programmer event.

One of the skewed ironies of the 2020s entertainment industry is the extent to which those of us still championing theatrical have been put in a skewed position of rooting for the very kind of “I.P. for the sake of I.P.” flicks that helped streaming gain a massive cultural and commercial foothold over the multiplex in the first place. “Thank goodness,” we exclaimed when the LeBron James-starring Space Jam: A New Legacy opened with $31 million amid a COVID-impacted summer of 2021. “Take that, doomsayers,” shouted when Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick and Illumination’s Minions: The Rise of Gru both overperformed even optimistic expectations and undercut talking points about older audiences and families being reluctant to return to theaters. “Theatrical lives, dammit!” we somewhat declared when a prequel origin story for William J. Wonka legged out past $600 million to become the de-facto 2023 Christmas/New Year’s event flick.

Amblin’s Twisters just opened with $80.5 million, with $9.2 million in Imax. Directed by Oklahoma native Lee Isaac Chung coming off the Oscar-winning Minari, with a screenplay by Mark L. Smith and a story from Top Gun: Maverick and Only the Brave director Joseph Kosinski, the picture is an attempt to take a singular one-and-done blockbuster and turn it into a proverbial franchise/I.P. Sony has been trying that in one form (Answer the Call in 2016) or another (Afterlife in 2021) with Ghostbusters since the 1989 sequel to (at best) mixed results, but they hit paydirt in 2017 with the reinvented from the ground-up sequel to Jumanji. In a world where audiences will only show up for franchise-specific event films and yet are deeply unwilling to try out new or new-to-cinema franchises, Hollywood has been stuck trying to turn singular hits from decades past into “brands” or “franchises.

Well, at least it worked this time, with Twisters opening in between Godzilla x Kong ($80 million) and Dune Part Two ($81.5 million) to nab the year’s third-biggest Fri-Sun debut behind obviously the year’s champ Inside Out 2 ($155 million). The film cost $155 million, compared to $92 million in 1996 (around $224 million adjusted for inflation), but had to deal with an entertainment ecosystem where films of the size and scale of Twisters were not automatic mega-event films but weekly par for the course release. In 1996, Twister opened with $41 million and legged out to $241 million domestic and $496 million worldwide, the fifth biggest opening ever and the ninth-biggest global total of all time (tenth if you note Independence Day just two months later).

So, playing 50% female, 50% non-white and 65% 18-44, how did Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery make “disaster” strike twice?