The 1996 disaster film “Twister” was a huge hit at the time, which might be a little puzzling why a new film was only just announced after the death of co-lead Bill Paxton in 2017. It focused on a group of storm chasers that were looking to use a piece of technology to better understand the inner workings of a tornado and became an early adopter of CGI effects for a destructive-focused action film in the 1990s. Well, before the new “reimagining” was announced by Universal/Amblin, another version was being co-written by Daveed Diggs with the hope of his “Blingspotting” series co-star Helen Hunt eyed to direct it, who was essentially the main star of the original “Twister.”
This version was expected to be a direct sequel with a diverse twist to it, but it didn’t end up getting made, leading to that aforementioned reboot from director Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari“). Now, Diggs is speaking with Insider about what happened to his take on “Twister” as the actor/writer alludes to “shady” things on the studio side that led to the project not coming together.
“Oh man, I’m not going to get into it mostly because I’m probably going to misremember things,” Diggs told Insider. “But all I’ll say is there was an opportunity where we were talking about that, and it didn’t happen, and the reasons that it didn’t happen are potentially shady. But shady in the way that we know the industry is shady.”
Diggs didn’t expand upon what those reasons could be, but one could imagine that some studio executives might have had second thoughts about doing a diverse sequel with Hunt in the director’s chair. Universal recently hiring a young white actress like Daisy Edgar-Jones might point to one of those “shady reasons.” Then again, that’s simply speculation on our part, simply from what this new film is starting to look like.