by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
Twisters | 2024
It's almost surprising that it's taken almost 30 years to make a sequel to Twister, since that film was a runaway hit and the second-highest-grossing film of 1996 (behind Independence Day, which didn't get a sequel until 2016). Perhaps it was the failure of director Jan De Bont's Speed 2: Cruise Control or the fact that it was such a self-contained story, but whatever the reason, it's taken a surprising amount of decades for the studios to return to this particular well.
For most of its life, the Cannon Group was a minor studio known for brawny B-movies like Death Wish, Cobra, Missing in Action, and Masters of the Universe. But during the 1980s, under the direction of co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who bought the company in 1979, Cannon also used some of its profits to take chances on risky auteur-driven projects in an attempt to gain some prestige. One such project was Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, a deal Golan and Globus infamously made with Godard on a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival, where the pair were tenaciously courting filmmakers.