Twisters blows CinemaCon away with an extended action-packed preview

Twisters stars Daisy Edgar-Jones (Where the Crawdads Sing) and Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick) as opposing forces who come together to try to predict, and possibly tame, the immense power of tornadoes. Twisters got some major love during Universal’s presentation at CinemaCon, with the audience getting to see an extended preview of the movie.

The extended preview starts off at a rodeo, which is disrupted by a giant tornado as bulls and horses run wild amidst the chaos. We see scenes of Powell’s character as assembles a group of storm chasers as two tornados combine to form a super tornado. “It’s alright to be scared… fear is the reason you do it,” Powell’s character says. “You don’t face your fears, you ride them.” Our own Chris Bumbray said that the new footage looks huge with tons of stuff happening, but he added that it looks “a little bombastic” when compared to the more realistic tone of the original movie. Still, it has a very fun, upbeat vibe, with Powell and Edgar-Jones having some great chemistry.

Director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) said tornadoes were a part of his everyday life growing up in Arkansas, and the original Twister movie was a huge classic for him and his friends. He loved the idea of storm chasers running into a twister rather than running away. While he was terrified of tackling such a big blockbuster, he took inspiration from those storm chasers and elected to run toward his fears rather than away from them. Chung told the CinemaCon audience that Twisters is designed to be totally immersive, and they even sent actual storm chasers out to get the footage used in the movie.

Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, and Anthony Ramos were on stage, and when they mentioned being pelted with debris from jet engine wind machines, an actual wind machine was brought out for Edgar-Jones to fling water and debris at Powerll and Ramos.

Edgar-Jones plays Kate Cooper, “a former storm chaser haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years who now studies storm patterns on screens safely in New York City. She is lured back to the open plains by her friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos) to test a groundbreaking new tracking system. There, she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Powell), the charming and reckless social-media superstar who thrives on posting his storm-chasing adventures with his raucous crew, the more dangerous the better. As storm season intensifies, terrifying phenomena never seen before are unleashed, and Kate, Tyler and their competing teams find themselves squarely in the paths of multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma in the fight of their lives.” The film also stars Brandon Perea (Nope), Sasha Lane (American Honey), Daryl McCormack (Peaky Blinders), Kiernan Shipka (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), Nik Dodani (Atypical), Katy O’Brien (Love Lies Bleeding), and Maura Tierney (Beautiful Boy).

While the sequel doesn’t have a big connection to the original film, Powell has previously said that it’s definitely not a reboot. “We’re not trying to recreate the story from the first one,” Powell said. “It’s a completely original story. There are no characters from the original movie back, so it’s not really a continuation. It’s just its own standalone story in the modern-day.“

Twisters will hit theaters on July 19th.