Twisters, and other disaster movies that need sequels

Ash Walker • 24 Jul 2024 Features

Does the success of Twisters mean Hollywood will start making sequels to other disaster movies? Probably.

Twisters, the belated sequel to classic ‘90s disaster epic Twister, is now in cinemas - and it’s already whipping up a storm at the box office.

Seeing Hollywood return to this particular well got us thinking - what other beloved disaster movies are in need of a sequel? And what would those hypothetical sequels look like? Would they be any good?

Probably not, as it turns out.

Volcanoes

According to Hollywood legend, director James Cameron’s pitch meeting for the sequel to Alien was short and sweet: he simply walked up to a whiteboard, wrote ALIEN, and added an S. Then, in a stroke of audacious genius, Cameron turned that S into a dollar sign.

Surely, the pitch for Twisters was similar - and so is our pitch for the sequel to 1997’s Volcano. In the original, a volcano awakens beneath the streets of Los Angeles, and only Tommy Lee Jones can stop it.

In the sequel, Jones - reprising his role as grumpy OEM (Office of Emergency Management) Director Mike Roark, now retired - must face off against a multitude of lava-spewing orifices. Imagine it! A volcano emerging amidst the luxury of Rodeo Drive. Or molten magma exploding out of the hills, melting the iconic Hollywood sign.

The only way to stop the disaster? Jones sets off an explosion deep in the San Andreas fault, sending the City of Angels into the Pacific Ocean, and dousing those pesky volcanoes for good.

Not to be confused with another lava-centric legacy sequel, to be released in the same year - Dante’s Peak Strikes Back.

The Day After the Day After Tomorrow

2004’s The Day After Tomorrow was a mad, frantic warning about the dangers of climate change, in which a cataclysmic temperature shift kicks off a series of global superstorms. Helicopters are frozen in mid-air, Los Angeles is destroyed by tornadoes and New York is almost completely submerged by floodwater.

It ends with the start of a new ice age, and the surviving population of the Northern Hemisphere moving south, to sunnier climes. And that’s exactly where our sequel picks up, twenty years later.

Sam Hall (Jake Gyllenhaal), following in his father’s climatologist footsteps, predicts that another superstorm is on the way - this time looking to flash-freeze the other half of the planet. Of course, no one believes him until it’s too late.

Cue two hours of eye-watering destruction as Sam and his family head north to the relative safety of the frozen United States. Unfortunately, there’s a whole army of CGI wolves waiting for them.

If successful, this could be followed up with a prequel, exploring how Sam’s dad, Jack (a de-aged Dennis Quaid) got into climatology in the first place. The title? The Day Before Tomorrow, of course.

Deeper Impact

Common Hollywood wisdom is that a sequel has to be BIGGER in every way. But how do you go bigger than the world-ending threat of 1998’s Deep Impact?

Easy - threaten everything, everywhere!

Leo Biederman (Elijah Wood, reprising his role from the original) is a NASA scientist who discovers something big and bad hurtling towards Earth. But this isn’t any plain old comet, this is some kind of multiversal asteroid, which will hit the Earth so hard it’ll destroy our big blue marble in every dimension.

The only solution? To put together a ragtag crew from across the disaster movie multiverse, including roughneck drill master AJ Frost (Ben Affleck) from Armageddon, and growly engineer John Garrity (Gerard Butler) from Greenland.

Their plan is so mad, so audacious that it just might work: using gigantic, strategically-placed rockets, the team will move the planet out of the way, letting the dastardly space rock zoom safely by.

In the film’s most beloved scene, Gerry Butler tries to punch the asteroid in the face and is tragically blasted into the cold reaches of space, as Aerosmith sings I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing on the soundtrack. Everyone in the audience is reduced to tears.

Independence Day 2

Those pesky, landmark-destroying monsters from the 1996 classic return to finish what they started, with a new fleet of city-sized ships.

Only this time, humans have had twenty years to prepare, and have used discarded alien technology from the first attack to create super jets and moon bases and… wait a minute, this already happened, didn’t it? Oh well, never mind.