Box office: Twisters takes the world by storm

The sequel-of-sorts to the 1996 disaster movie Twister blew past expectations to have the 3rd-best opening of the year so far.

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell in Twisters.

Tornadoes took the world by storm this week.

Twisters, a sequel of sorts to the 1996 disaster movie Twister—it doesn’t have any characters from the original film, but it does have lots of Easter eggs that point back to that movie—opened to $81.2 million over the past weekend, a figure that includes Wednesday and Thursday “preview” screenings.

That’s a lot higher than the $55 million or so that some box-office pundits were predicting just last week, and—together with fellow overperformer Inside Out 2 and the solid performances of the latest Bad Boys and Despicable Me movies—it’s the latest sign that the summer movie season might turn out to be not quite as bad in the end as some people were fearing even two months ago.

Twisters scored the third-best opening of the year so far, behind Inside Out 2 and Dune: Part Two, and it’s already the second-highest-grossing film in which any of its three lead actors have played lead characters (behind Glen Powell’s Anyone but You, Daisy Edgar-Jones’s Where the Crawdads Sing, and Anthony Ramos’s Transformers: Rise of the Beasts—and it will probably pass all three of those films by next week).

The film also marks a striking addition to the filmography of its director, Colorado-born, Arkansas-raised Lee Isaac Chung. I first mentioned Chung at my blog seventeen years ago, when his first feature film—Munyurangabo, which he directed while on a missions trip in Rwanda—premiered at the Cannes film festival. (I reviewed the film when it came to Vancouver two years later, here.)

More recently, he directed the semi-autobiographical Minari, which won an Oscar for supporting actress Youn Yuh-jung and earned five other nominations besides, including two for Chung himself as writer and director.

And now he has a genuine blockbuster under his belt.

It will be very interesting to see where he goes from here.

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: