19 ways ‘Twisters’ references original ‘Twister’

Everyone involved in Twisters is quick to point out it is not a traditional sequel to 1996’s Twister.

Instead, director Lee Isaac Chung and his cast — led by Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, and  Anthony Ramos — use phrases like “standalone sequel” or “modern-day chapter” to describe the movie to Entertainment Weekly, meaning the story takes place in the same world as the first film but there are no returning characters from the Helen Hunt–Bill Paxton blockbuster.

But, while no OG Twister characters pop up or are even referenced in Twisters, the movie still finds plenty of ways to pay homage to the original story. Here are 19 examples of how the new film (in theaters now) honors the first.

Muskogee State University

Twisters begins with five Muskogee State University students — Kate (Edgar-Jones), Javi (Ramos), Jeb (Daryl McCormack), Addy (Kiernan Shipka), and Praveen (Nik Dodani) — out in the field chasing storms. The team Jo (Hunt) and Bill (Paxton) lead in Twister are associated with the same fictional alma mater: stickers for the school appear on their vehicles and Laurence (Jeremy Davies) wears a shirt with the school’s emblem on it.

The Dorothy Machines

Jo and Bill’s team of storm chasers spend Twister attempting to release sensors into a tornado to gather more information about how tornadoes are formed — with the ultimate goal of developing a more advanced warning system. Their sensors are housed in large metal barrel contraptions they call “Dorothy machines” (based on a real-life called TOTO, which stands for TOtable Tornado Observatory). “Dorothy I,” “Dorothy II,” and “Dorothy III” are destroyed before the sensors deploy, but the film ends with the success of “Dorothy IV.”

Jo and Bill only had four Dorothys in Twister. But there was apparently a “Dorothy V” built because it appears at the start of Twisters. While Kate is focused on an experiment that could “tame” a tornado, Javi is working on collecting more data in the same manner as Jo and Bill. There is no mention of the Twister storm chasers, and the sensors definitely appear to be upgraded for 2024, but “Dorothy V” looks like it was made back in 1996.

The Wizard of Oz theme is expanded later in the new film, with the team of chasers led by Javi using codenames “Scarecrow,” “Tin Man,” “Lion,” and “Wizard.”

Aunt Meg, meet Ms. Carter

“Food. Fooooood.” Dusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman) craves “sustenance” after the sister tornadoes and cow flying in Twister, and he and the rest of the storm chasers know where to find it: At the dining room table of Jo’s Aunt Meg (Lois Smith) in nearby Wakita.

In Twisters, the MSU kids are also excited about bar-b-que, but this time, it’s promised by Kate’s mom, Cathy (Maura Tierney). Similar to the way Jo’s team is worked up into a fervor at the thought of Aunt Meg’s cooking, Kate’s friends joke and scream in the background as the mother and daughter chat in the car as they head into the storm.

Jonas, meet Scott

In Twister, it’s very clear who the heroes and villains are. We’re meant to root for Jo and Bill’s ragtag group of storm chasers — in their eclectic clothing and caravan of beat-up cars and an RV. The enemy is their former friend Jonas (Cary Elwes) and his corporate-funded, pompous team who “stole” Bill’s idea for Dorothy (though Jonas would call it an “unrealized idea, unrealized”).

It’s a lot less clear at the start of Twisters who we’re meant to champion, with director Lee Isaac Chung and screenwriter Mark L. Smith intentionally blurring the lines to keep things interesting. Kate and Javi are our entry point, but they arrive in Oklahoma as the uniformed, corporate-funded StormPar team. Powell’s Tyler Owens and his team show up pompous, selling T-shirts with his face on them and bragging about their million subscribers on YouTube.

But one true villain quickly emerges: Javi’s business partner Scott (James Gunn’s new Superman star David Corenswet). The press notes for the film reveal Corenswet “saw the morally shady Scott as being in the lineage of the Cary Elwes’ character,” with the actor stating, “Scott’s slightly arrogant but also very capable and has a keen mind. He represents the darker side of the motivations of storm chasers.”

Even the way the Twisters teams drive harkens back to the original film. Both teams emerge onto a small road out of nowhere and run the other off the pavement at different points in the film.

Dusty, meet Tyler’s storm wranglers

The original Twister had a deep bench of talent, including Alan Ruck, Jami Gertz, Anthony Rapp, Alexa PenaVega, Zach Grenier, and more. But most fans would say the standout character was Dusty, played by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Twisters director Chung and costume designer Eunice Jera Lee both wanted to strongly honor Dusty when putting together the looks of Tyler’s team of “storm wranglers” (played by Brandon Perea, Sasha Lane, Tunde Adebimpe, and Katy O’Brian). “Perhaps the most explicit of those homages are on Boone, Tyler’s right-hand man and hype beast, played by Brandon Perea, who rocks some tie-dye,” says Lee, “and on Lily, played by Sasha Lane, the group’s free-spirited drone flyer, whose pants have swatches of floral fabric, all nods to Dusty’s wardrobe prints.”

Melissa, meet Ben

Helen Hunt recently told EW that Jami Gertz is the “secret weapon” of Twister‘s success. As Bill’s fiancée Melissa, Gertz played the outsider — creating a love triangle for Bill and Jo but also serving as the conduit for a lot of exposition about what storm chasers do and how tornadoes work. In Twisters, Downton Abbey and The Crown actor Harry Hadden-Paton fills that role as Ben, a risk-averse British journalist writing a profile on Tyler.

“Ben’s an outsider,” Hadden-Paton says. “He’s there to do his job as a journalist and gets pulled into this world he knows little about. A regular assignment becomes a terrifying adventure he must learn how to survive.”

Unlike Melissa, Ben isn’t treated to any flying cows… but Kate and Javi do get surprised by a chicken.

Bill, meet Kate

Bill’s first Twister scene involves him repeatedly telling his former team that he’s “not back,” and Kate says the exact same (though only once) when she returns to the field. Later, over a BBQ meal at Kate’s childhood home, Ms. Carter shares a story about how, as a young child, Kate ran out of the house completely naked to watch an approaching storm. This echoes the story told around Aunt Meg’s table about how the team met Bill, who was “buck naked” (or, as he tells it, “half-naked”), hurling a bottle of alcohol into a tornado.

Kate also steps into Bill’s shoes as a tornado whisperer of sorts. Both characters have a sixth sense about storms, and their rivals (Tyler and Jonas, respectively) wait to see where they will go before leaving their pit stop. (Kate even offers to get her and Tyler “a couple of drinks,” which echoes a moment between Bill and Melissa.)

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Kate’s wardrobe

Costume designer Lee says she intentionally nodded to Jo with one of Kate’s looks in Twisters (a tank top, khaki overshirt, and khaki pants) but also snuck in a less-obvious reference to the 1996 classic: In one scene, Kate wears an oversized baseball jersey, a reference to what a young boy is wearing in the final scene of Twister as he emerges from a storm cellar. “It was such an arresting image to land on, this little blond boy in a baseball jersey with a ‘Bombers’ logo on it,” Lee says. “And because Kate is blonde, I thought it would be interesting, as an Easter egg, to tie these characters together. It’s the same style jersey, with a slightly tweaked graphic.”

The Sunflowers

The climax of Twister involved a large sunflower field, something Twisters production designer Patrick Sullivan wanted to pay homage to — and for good reason: Sullivan got his start in show business working in the art department on the 1996 film and helped plant those sunflowers. He says it took months to grow the flowers back then, but when they decided that Ms. Carter’s home should have a blooming sunflower field, “Fortunately, I had an amazing greensman who can work miracles,” says Sullivan, who tasked the head of the Twisters greens department, Andrew Nowling, with creating a field of artificial sunflowers with PVC pipe and tinted leaves. “I was so grateful,” Sullivan says. “It was fun to get sunflowers into the film and use them to immerse all of us, filmmakers and audience, in the world of Twister again.”

The Paxtons

Conventionally, even if it’s a “standalone sequel,” one of the characters has a tie to an original character. And while that’s not true in the case of Twisters, the film does include someone actually related to an OG star. James Paxton, the son of the late Bill Paxton, makes a cameo appearance as a disgruntled motel guest. “It’s an Easter egg for the fans of Dad and the original,” James Paxton told EW recently. “I did this one for Dad.”

Let’s go to the movies

The penultimate tornado in Twister wreaks havoc on a drive-in movie theater, eventually ripping through the screen as Jack Nicholson terrorizes Shelley Duvall in The Shining. Twisters‘ big gathering is a rodeo, but a movie theater is destroyed in the finale, the tornado tearing through the screen just the same — though this time it’s Frankenstein.

Please consider assisting the American Red Cross in helping people affected by disasters like tornadoes, fires, and countless other crises by making a gift to American Red Cross Disaster Relief.