Damn, y'all really like watching Glen Powell punch tornadoes

Glen Powell’s ongoing and aggressive campaign to get so famous and successful that we no longer feel a phantom urge to stick an extra “n” in his first name hit a new milestone this week, as his new film Twisters looks set to have one of the most successful openings for a live-action movie in all of 2024. (It’s not quite posting Despicable Me 4 numbers, but what flesh amongst us can aspire to such lofty animated heights?)

This is per THR, which reports that Twisters is on track for a $74.6 million opening, well above initial expectations, and on-par with the year’s biggest non-animated hits like Dune: Part Two and Godzilla x Kong—notable after a spring movie season that saw a number of (semi-) realistic films like The Fall Guy slump well below expectations. It’s also a highlight for Powell, who—discounting his contributions to Top Gun: Maverick—has yet to have a major blockbuster hit. Starring along Daisy Edgar-Jones (also having a breakout, after smaller films like Where The Crawdads Sing), it appears to have produced a genuine summer disaster movie blockbuster. People just really like looking at tornadoes and pretty people standing near them, as near as we can reckon.

Elsewhere at the box office, animation continues to dominate: Despicable Me 4 will land at second with its domestic take this weekend, while Pixar’s Inside Out 2—now in its sixth week in theaters—will score a comfortable third place, adding a tidy $12 million to its planetary haul of $1.4 billion. The most successful movie of 2024 by a lot, Inside Out 2 is on track to shortly score the title of “most successful animated movie of all time,” coming up close behind Frozen II.

Meanwhile, down at the bottom of the pack, Nicolas Cage’s Longlegs continued its low-budget Neon success story at 4th, ahead of A Quiet Place: Day One and rom-com Fly Me To The Moon, which has sunk to a sluggish sixth place.